Introduction

At the beginning of 2001, there was a lot of discussion of Stanley Kubrick's famous movie: how close had we come to the world portrayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey? In particular, would computers soon be able to understand human language and hold conversations with us? Though we have not reached that point yet, advances in language technology have been rapid and impressive, and this has transformed the process of creating dictionaries.

There has never been a more exciting time to produce a new dictionary. Everything is changing, diversifying, and expanding: the English language itself, the technology that helps us to describe it, and the needs and goals of people learning and teaching English.

The 1980s saw the development of the first large corpora of English text. Twenty years on, the use of the corpus as the primary data source for dictionaries has become standard practice, and the quality, range, and sheer volume of available corpus resources has increased dramatically. This means we are in a better position than ever before to provide a description of English that reliably corresponds to the way that people speak and write the language.