What's new in the Second Edition?
Our new edition contains several thousand more words than the first MED. Some of these are words, meanings, and phrases that have entered the language in the last five years or so. New vocabulary generally comes into use in order to meet our need to talk about things that are important to us, so you can get a good idea of the way the world is changing by looking at neologisms. New technology, for example, is developing even faster than before, and new terms have been coined to describe things that didn’t exist just a few years ago (words such as podcasting, Skype™, satnav, and link rot). Changes in lifestyle are reflected in words like work-life balance, boutique hotel, life coach, and – unfortunately – binge drinking. Politics and current affairs are always well-represented in any list of new vocabulary items, and the new edition of MED includes words like bird flu, bioterrorism, glocalization, and weapons of mass destruction. Not surprisingly, our concerns about climate change are reflected in the large number of new terms relating to environmental issues, such as carbon trading, biofuel, food miles, and microgeneration.
As well as adding lots of general new vocabulary, we have also – in response to our user-survey – made the dictionary more useful for professional and academic users by adding hundreds of specialist terms. These come from a range of subject-fields, especially business and finance, science, information technology, medicine, and the arts. People studying to be doctors or nurses, for example, can now look up terms like ventricle, lymphocyte, carcinoma, and synovial fluid. Similar technical vocabulary is now included for many other fields as well. Take cinema, for example; if you’ve ever looked at the credits at the end of a movie and wondered what a best boy is, what job the gaffer does on a film set, or what is meant by a director’s cut, you can find the answers in MED. In another innovation, we have now applied ‘labels’ to indicate when a word or meaning belongs to a particular subject-field. The terms mentioned above have the labels MEDICAL or CINEMA, and you can use the ‘Advanced Search’ function on the CD-ROM to find every word or phrase in the dictionary belonging to any of these fields. (For example, there are 122 terms with the CINEMA label, 712 in the MEDICAL field, and 344 items of LEGAL terminology.)
But we know, from talking to teachers and students, that dictionary users don't just need new words and terms - they also need advice about how to choose the 'best' word to express their ideas and feelings. In response to this, MED now includes a special 'Expand Your Vocabulary' section in the centre of the book (the pages with grey edges). English is rich in synonyms, and in this section we start from familiar, 'basic' words and show how you can express the same ideas in more interesting, more precise ways. It's easy enough, for example, to say that you are surprised about something, but in some situations it might be more appropriate to say that you are taken aback or speechless, that you find something astonishing, or that something has taken you by surprise. Learning to express ideas in more varied ways is one of the things that separates intermediate learners from more advanced users of English. These 24 pages, which clearly explain how and when to use hundreds of words in the key areas of Emotions, Communication, and Movement, form a valuable resource for anyone wanting to enrich their vocabulary.
Learner corpora and writing skills >