Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary: Helping Learners with Real English

This is without doubt the best English dictionary on the market. In fact, this book is the only reference you may need to enhance and improve your vocabulary. I would like to stress though that the book is intended primarily for advanced students of english language. I own a great number of dictionaries but none of them is nearly as good as this one. The greatest strength of this dictionary is the improved structure that facilitates retrieval of the target word. Moreover, the dictionary provides valuable examples as to how to use the words in various contexts. This feature will help you choose the correct word in any given context. I strongly recommend this book to all learners of english language, but especially to the advanced students!

I learned English for many years and I used more than eight English-English dictionaries.When I saw the Collins COBUILD English dictionary in a bookstore, I was very excited. I had been using English-English dictionaries for years and I had formed some expectations. This dictionary immediately impressed me as the best one so far. The best by far. I knew that I had been waiting for this dictionary for many years.You can use this dictionary when you don't understand a word. You will learn its meaning through seeing this word used in sentences. The sentences use the word as it is used naturally by native speakers. The sentences are not artificial. They are real sentences.You can use this dictionary to learn how to use a word in your own sentences. You can follow the example sentences which already use this word correctly. The dictionary is full of example sentences. Even the definitions are written in the form of whole sentences.Reading correct English sentences is the most important thing for learning English. When you use this dictionary, you read many sentences in English. Therefore this dictionary is a good tool for learning English.

Since medieval times, dictionaries were crammed with cryptic abbreviations, special symbols, and the driest and most compact definitions possible. This dictionary is the first one to use the innovative "natural" approach to presenting the English language. Its definitions are not only easier to read and understand; more importantly, they are more precise because they portray the word in its actual contexts, with all of its slightest connotations and shades of meaning made obvious. Other dictionaries can only be used to look up a non-familiar word and, more or less, get to its meaning; this one if the only English dictionary that really allows you to master a new word in all of its aspects so you can use it as if you knew it from your childhood.

For English learners like me, this is kind of a bible. When I don't get a meaning of a word, it doesn't just rephrase like other dictionaries. This dictionary explains the meaning in a sentence. This is like a home teacher!

I've used this dictionary myself ever since I bought it several years ago, and have always suggested it to my students. They have all found it very useful. Simply the best you can get; the definitions are all taken from original sources, but they are still easy to understand; it gives a lot of very important information about each word - I could go on ... Get it!