Bigger and Better
First, we have expanded and improved all of MED’s most popular features, including:
In addition, the Macmillan English Dictionaries Website continues to provide a fantastic range of teaching and learning resources, and is now visited by almost 50,000 users every week. Meanwhile, we continue to produce our popular ‘webzine’, MED Magazine, which is packed with interesting features and read by over 100,000 subscribers. With an archive of almost 50 editions, it forms a valuable catalogue of language-learning materials. And everything we say about the way the English language works is underpinned by our constantly improving language resources. We now have much larger language corpora – and much smarter software for analysing them – than we had ten years ago, and this means that the information we give about things like word frequency, phraseology, and collocation is now even more reliable.
- the innovative metaphor boxes, which reveal the underlying connections between the different words and phrases we use to express particular ideas or feelings. The new edition contains dozens of new boxes of this type.
- synonyms and antonyms - students and teachers we talked to told us how useful this kind of information was, so we have added hundreds of new synonyms and antonyms.
- the collocation boxes - another first for MED - which list the main 'collocates' of a headword (the words it most frequently combines with). As well as adding many new collocation boxes - there are now over 500 - we have added many more collocates to the existing boxes.
- the Language Awareness pages in the middle of the book, designed to promote a better understanding of how the English language works. These were really one of the most popular features of our first edition, particularly among language-teachers. The original articles can still be found on the CD-ROM, and for the new MED, we have commissioned a fresh set of fascinating essays from star authors such as Simon Greenall, Michael Hoey, Frank Boers, Scott Thornbury, and Pete Sharma.