A brief history of Macmillan's
award-winning English dictionaries

Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus is the fourth in a series of new learner dictionaries from Macmillan.

The Macmillan English Dictionary, published in January 2002, was written for good intermediate and advanced learners of English. Within a year, it had become the best-selling advanced learner's dictionary, and the success of this first year was crowned with the prestigious Duke of Edinburgh English-Speaking Union English Language Book Award.



In March 2004, the complete package of Macmillan
English Dictionary publications, including the CD-ROM and website, won the British Council Innovations Awards. Click here for more information about this dictionary.

The Macmillan Essential Dictionary, written for intermediate learners of English, followed in 2003, and in 2004 came Macmillan School Dictionary, written for students who are studying their school subjects through the medium of English.


The CD-ROM and website accompanying the Macmillan School Dictionary won the English-Speaking Union President's Award 2004.

The same team of lexicographers now brings you Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus, created to help learners deal confidently with phrasal verbs in English.

In creating Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus, the team has benefitted from the advice of teachers, students, teacher trainers, academics and ELT writers.

Like the other Macmillan English dictionaries,  
Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus was largely created using the World English Corpus. This database of over 200 million words reveals fresh information on how words are used and provides natural examples of phrasal verbs as they are written and spoken today. It is an up-to-date corpus created from British and American written and spoken text collected from a range of media (books, magazines, newspapers, e-mails, television and radio). In order to ensure that the dictionary is suitable for learners of English, the corpus has been expanded to include material from ELT coursebooks and readers, ensuring that the dictionary covers all the important phrasal verbs.

Extensive analysis of the corpus of real spoken and written text has allowed the dictionary writers to reveal fresh information about how and when words are used, and to ensure that Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus is the most up-to-date and reliable dictionary of its kind.

Click here to see all the other interesting features we have built into the dictionary for you.