Red letter day - a review of the Macmillan Essential Dictionary

EL Gazette, February 2004

Wayne Trotman

The Macmillan Essential Dictionary makes several claims. Among them is that it has more entries than any other for intermediate level learners. But does more mean better? Perhaps, but these particular entries have come from the 200 million words of spoken and written English in the World English Corpus that also includes material from an exclusive corpus of learner errors. A larger corpus enables lexicographers to access such a mass of data that, using advanced software, it should provide more reliable samples of language with which to analyse collocation and syntactical behavious than its predecessors.

This reference tool is not simply an afterthought on the part of the team of lexicographers that brought us the award-winning Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. It contains many of its appealing spin-offs, including the publisher’s seeming predilection for red, which appears everywhere, to indicate key words and their related details, plus all important phrasal verbs.

So what have the team of editors done to make the Essential not only attractive, but of even greater use to learners? Well, they’ve drawn up a 3,500-word list of what the corpus data indicate are the most frequently used items required by those at intermediate level. As was the case with the advanced dictionary, these words are divided into three groups and given eye-catching star ratings (in red) of between one and three: three stars for the most common and basic words (e.g. morning), two for very common words such as moon and moral. Users may be surprised to discover that, on the whole, it’s the three-star words that are given more explanation by the editors of the Essential. These, though, will be the most commonly looked-up items as they are also the ones that confuse by changing their meaning in subtle ways according to the words accompanying them.

On almost every page in the Essential appear ‘Word Families’ and ‘Words Often Used With...’. Another extremely useful feature is a thesaurus-style facility: ‘Other Ways of Saying....’ – for example cook: bake, boil, fry. There is also a synonym feature: make: for factories – assemble; for structures – erect, and dozens of alternatives for nice are listed: for people – easygoing etc. As a teacher of writing, I shall certainly be using that section plus the one with alternatives for bad and new.

The ‘Language Study’ section looks closely at collocation, metaphor, register, text-types and word formation, all of which are possible to edit and print from the accompanying CD-ROM. Also available for editing are the eight pages of topic vocabulary that focus on areas such as new technology and which include acronyms like BTW (by the way) for use in text messages. These, and other features of the CD-ROM such as the colour illustrations, Smart Search and Sound Search, make the Essential a superb learning resource.