Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners

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Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, also known as MEDAL, is an advanced learner's dictionary first published in 2002 by Macmillan Education. It shares most of the features of this type of dictionary: it provides definitions in simple language, using a controlled defining vocabulary; most words have example sentences to illustrate how they are typically used; and information is given about how words combine grammatically or in collocations. MEDAL also introduced a number of innovations. [1] [2] These include:

The Macmillan English Dictionary also existed as an electronic dictionary, available free on the Web. Like most online dictionaries, [7] it benefits from being able to update content regularly with new words and meanings. In addition to the dictionary, the online version had a thesaurus function enabling users to find synonyms for any word, phrase or meaning. [8] There was also a blog (the Macmillan Dictionary Blog) with daily postings on language issues, especially on global English and language change. [9] An "Open Dictionary" [10] allowed users to provide their own dictionary entries for new words they had come across. The online edition was recognised as a good example of this emerging genre of reference publishing. [11] The website of the electronic dictionary and the blog were closed on 30 June 2023. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dictionary</span> Collection of words and their meanings

A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.

Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.

In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality or the understanding of time in terms of money.

A defining vocabulary is a list of words used by lexicographers to write dictionary definitions. The underlying principle goes back to Samuel Johnson's notion that words should be defined using 'terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained', and a defining vocabulary provides the lexicographer with a restricted list of high-frequency words which can be used for producing simple definitions of any word in the dictionary.

A vocabulary is a set of words, typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word vocabulary originated from the Latin vocabulum, meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of language and communication, helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and information. Vocabulary can be oral, written, or signed and can be categorized into two main types: active vocabulary and passive vocabulary. An individual's vocabulary continually evolves through various methods, including direct instruction, independent reading, and natural language exposure, but it can also shrink due to forgetting, trauma, or disease. Furthermore, vocabulary is a significant focus of study across various disciplines, like linguistics, education, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Vocabulary is not limited to single words; it also encompasses multi-word units known as collocations, idioms, and other types of phraseology. Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language.

A monolingual learner's dictionary (MLD) is designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. MLDs are based on the premise that language-learners should progress from a bilingual dictionary to a monolingual one as they become more proficient in their target language, but that general-purpose dictionaries are inappropriate for their needs. Dictionaries for learners include information on grammar, usage, common errors, collocation, and pragmatics, which is largely missing from standard dictionaries, because native speakers tend to know these aspects of language intuitively. And while the definitions in standard dictionaries are often written in difficult language, those in an MLD use a simple and accessible defining vocabulary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collocation</span> Frequent occurrence of words next to each other

In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.

A specialized dictionary is a dictionary that covers a relatively restricted set of phenomena. The definitive book on the subject includes chapters on some of the dictionaries included below:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic dictionary</span> Dictionary whose data exists in digital form and can be accessed through a number of different media

An electronic dictionary is a dictionary whose data exists in digital form and can be accessed through a number of different media. Electronic dictionaries can be found in several forms, including software installed on tablet or desktop computers, mobile apps, web applications, and as a built-in function of E-readers. They may be free or require payment.

In linguistics, the term lexis designates the complete set of all possible words in a language, or a particular subset of words that are grouped by some specific linguistic criteria. For example, the general term English lexis refers to all words of the English language, while more specific term English religious lexis refers to a particular subset within English lexis, encompassing only words that are semantically related to the religious sphere of life.

A foreign language writing aid is a computer program or any other instrument that assists a non-native language user in writing decently in their target language. Assistive operations can be classified into two categories: on-the-fly prompts and post-writing checks. Assisted aspects of writing include: lexical, syntactic, lexical semantic and idiomatic expression transfer, etc. Different types of foreign language writing aids include automated proofreading applications, text corpora, dictionaries, translation aids and orthography aids.

Patrick Wyndham Hanks was an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names.

The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers. To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were omitted. In the original publication the relative frequencies of various senses of the words were also included.

<i>Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English</i> Advanced learners dictionary

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), first published by Longman in 1978, is an advanced learner's dictionary, providing definitions using a restricted vocabulary, helping non-native English speakers understand meanings easily. It is available in four configurations:

A word list is a list of a language's lexicon within some given text corpus, serving the purpose of vocabulary acquisition. A lexicon sorted by frequency "provides a rational basis for making sure that learners get the best return for their vocabulary learning effort", but is mainly intended for course writers, not directly for learners. Frequency lists are also made for lexicographical purposes, serving as a sort of checklist to ensure that common words are not left out. Some major pitfalls are the corpus content, the corpus register, and the definition of "word". While word counting is a thousand years old, with still gigantic analysis done by hand in the mid-20th century, natural language electronic processing of large corpora such as movie subtitles has accelerated the research field.

Ian Stephen Paul Nation is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of linguistics and teaching methodology.

Norbert Schmitt is an American applied linguist and Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He is known for his work on second-language vocabulary acquisition and second-language vocabulary teaching. He has published numerous books and papers on vocabulary acquisition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sketch Engine</span> Corpus manager and text analysis software

Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in 90+ languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Word sketch</span>

A word sketch is a one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summary of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour. Word sketches were first introduced by the British corpus linguist Adam Kilgarriff and exploited within the Sketch Engine corpus management system. They are an extension of the general collocation concept used in corpus linguistics in that they group collocations according to particular grammatical relations. The collocation candidates in a word sketch are sorted either by their frequency or using a lexicographic association score like Dice, T-score or MI-score.

Sylviane Granger is a Belgian linguist and emeritus professor of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). She is the founder of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) and is best known for her pioneering work in the field of Learner Corpus Research. She has mainly published in the areas of corpus linguistics, learner language, contrastive linguistics, translation studies and lexicography.

References

  1. Bogaards, Paul. Review article, International Journal of Lexicography, 16/1, 2003: 43–55
  2. Bejoint, H. The Lexicography of English. Oxford University Press, 2010: 186–189
  3. Kilgarriff, A. & Rundell, M. Lexical profiling software and its lexicographic applications – a case study. In Braasch and Povlsen (Eds.) Proceedings of the Tenth Euralex Congress, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. 2004, 807–818.
  4. I.S.P. Nation, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, Cambridge University Press 2001, 13–17
  5. Moon, R. On specifying metaphor: an idea and its implementation. International Journal of Lexicography, 17(2), 2004: 195–222
  6. Gilquin, G., Granger, S. & Paquot, M. Learner corpora: The missing link in EAP pedagogy. Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 6, 2007, 319–335
  7. Bejoint, H. The Lexicography of English Oxford University Press, 2010: 373–374
  8. Edemariam, Aida. "Online dictionaries: which is best?". The Guardian . 30 August 2010
  9. "That's my English". Macmillan Dictionary. Archived from the original on 2011-08-07. Retrieved 2011-08-24.
  10. "Open Dictionary". Macmillan Dictionary. Archived from the original on 2013-01-28. Retrieved 2011-08-24.
  11. Lannoy, V. Free online dictionaries: why and how?, in Granger, S. & Paquot, M. (Eds), eLexicography in the 21st Century: New Challenges, New Applications: Proceedings of eLex 2009, Louvain, Belgium: Cahiers du Cental. 2010, 173-182
  12. "Macmillan Dictionary to close after 14 years of online excellence". Macmillan Education. Archived from the original on 2024-02-01. Retrieved 2023-07-05.