English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners

This is the first history of dictionaries of English for foreign learners, from their beginnings in Japan and East Asia in the 1920s to the present day. Anthony Cowie describes the evolution of the major titles, and their fight for dominance of what soon became an enormous market. He shows how developments in lexical and grammatical theory, especially in the field of phraseological analysis, crucially affected the content and structure of ELT dictionaries. He provides a critical account of the corpus-based research at the heart of contemporary dictionary making.