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Macmillan
English Dictionary for Advanced Learners and Macmillan Essential Dictionary
(Intermediate level), Macmillan, 2002 and 2003 Wayne Trotman Reviewing dictionaries can be a tough task, especially if there’s little difference between the one in the writer’s hands and any of its predecessors. These two named above, however, were a delight to pore over, and it’s no surprise to me that the Advanced won a 2002 Duke of Edinburgh book award. The editors and their teams of lexicographers have delivered several novelties since the last major dictionary, the CIDE, was brought out by CUP several years ago. What have these teams done? Well, Michael Hoey has managed to write an interesting anecdotal Foreword, one worthy of several readings. In it, he explains how his earliest strategies for preparing a childhood dictionary are the antitheses of the one he now found himself advising on for Macmillan. For example, Hoey went to great lengths to find and explain obscure lexical items, whereas these take care to clarify the most common. Why so? Aren’t common words the most easily understood? Apparently not, since their meaning tends to shift if only slightly and in subtle ways depending on the words that accompany them. Since the most common are the most visited by users, much of the information is given in examples rather than definitions. The Macmillan English Dictionary guides to the correct meaning by indexes which appear like mini-menus. Word sketches appear throughout to inform users on collocational and syntactical behaviour of words with multiple meanings. Perhaps the main innovation is the distinction between words the average user will require to encode and all other words in the dictionary. This is done by drawing on the 200 million-word database and to arrive at a core of 7,500. All words in this list appear in red and are marked with between one and three star ratings. The most common are allotted three stars and are dealt with in greater depth. The
intermediate level Essential contains 3,500 most common words
and over a third of the hundred thousand found in the advanced dictionary.
Both have lengthy, informative language study sections and both include
a CD-ROM. Oh, and both are a far cry from anything the young Hoey could
have envisaged.
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