Online English Monolingual Learner’s Dictionaries

Due to the development of technology, well-established publishers began to provide their English Monolingual Learner's Dictionaries (MLDs) online and free of charge. Dictionaries of this type have their own history, as well as common and distinctive features. The article presents a brief outline of the subsequent stages of the development of English Monolingual Dictionaries, with special reference to MLDs available online. Also, the article includes a synthetic description of the primary and secondary components of a dictionary entry and demonstrates if these components are present or absent in three online Monolingual Learner's Dictionaries: the Cambridge Dictionary, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary. The article aims to characterise, compare and contrast some of the features of a typical entry in online English MLDs. Consequently, the scientific approach adopted in the analysis is a mixture of the comparative and the empirical method. Unlike previous topic-related research, the present study shows both common and distinctive features of the mentioned dictionaries and hints at their practical advantages (from the point of view of the end user).