Foreword

Randolph Quirk
(Professor the Lord Quirk, FBA)

Young people the world over know that English is the most important single tool they need to achieve success in their careers. This means acquiring and retaining an active knowledge of many thousands of words in an ever expanding, ever changing language.

This is quite a challenge – since a word may not only have several meanings but also vitally important (if subtle and invisible) relations with other words. For instance, hot contrasts with cold if our topic is the weather, but with mild if we are talking about curry. Or again, one meaning of remain is ‘stay’, but these two verbs are not freely interchangeable: stay is far more common in general and especially in spoken English, but remain is more common when used with seated.

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) is brilliant both at capturing such relations between words and at presenting them to the learner in an attractive and instantly comprehensible way that makes them easily memorable. In this current edition, Collocation boxes present users with over 65,000 common collocations whilst the integrated Thesaurus explains the differences between some 18,000 synonyms and closely related words. And as you would expect from Longman dictionaries, all of this information is illustrated with examples taken from the Longman Corpus Network.

Moreover, this new edition goes much further in recognising that a dictionary is no longer just a book but needs to be fully integrated with computers and mobile phones that are at least as much the modern learner’s essential everyday equipment as pen and paper. The accompanying DVD-ROM (for those who have bought that edition) not only contains thousands more collocations, synonyms, and examples, it also gives the lucky users free access to Longman Dictionaries Online where they can find additional words and phrases along with a wealth of interactive exercises and teaching resources – all regularly updated so that users always have the very latest information at their fingertips. But having access to this information and actually learning it are two very different things – which is where the Longman Vocabulary Trainer comes into play. This software is so excellently targeted on the individual learner that it remembers errors made and takes care that the points in question are re-tested until they are thoroughly learned. The Longman Vocabulary Trainer can also be loaded on to a mobile phone so that a student can do some vocabulary revision while travelling on the bus, waiting for friends or even queuing at the check-out!

But if a dictionary is no longer just a book, it is most certainly also a book. With this fifth edition, the LDOCE lexicographers are maintaining a long tradition of skilled analysis and definition, ever alert to the changing language and to the changing needs of learners. Let no one forget that the Longman name was already on the title page of Johnson’s epoch-making Dictionary of the English Language in 1755!