Recent Trends in English Pedagogical Lexicography

Abstract I have to look in the dictionary to find out what a virgin is ... The dictionary says, Virgin, woman (usually a young woman) who is and remains in a state of inviolate chastity. Now I have to look up inviolate and chastity and all I can find here is that inviolate means not violated and chastity means chaste and that means pure from unlawful sexual intercourse. Now I have to look up intercourse and that leads to intromission ... I don’t know what that means and I’m too weary going from one word to another in this heavy dictionary ... and all because the people who wrote the dictionary don’t want the likes of me to know anything. Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (1996), ch. XII, p. 333. The English monolingual learner’s dictionary (MLD) currently occupies one of the most fiercely competitive marketplaces in the publishing world. The number of serious players at the advanced-learner level has now – with the recent appearance of US and Australian titles – reached double figures. This makes it all the more surprising that Hornby’s Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (ISED: 1942) and its Oxford successors had the field virtually to themselves for over 30 years. Since Hornby’s dictionary met its first real challenge, with the publication in 1978 of the first Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE1), the pace of change has been rapid – driven by a combination of theoretically-informed innovation, astonishing technological advances, and the creativity of dictionary-publishers in responding to the known and perceived needs of users.