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This is acomparison of English dictionaries, which aredictionaries about theEnglish language. The dictionaries listed here are categorized into "full-size" dictionaries (which extensively cover the language, and are targeted to native speakers), "collegiate" (which are smaller, and often contain other biographical or geographical information useful to college students), and "learner's" (which are even smaller, targeted to English language learners, and which all use theInternational Phonetic Alphabet to indicate pronunciation).
These dictionaries generally contain fewer entries (and fewer definitions per entry) than their full-size counterparts but may contain additional material, such as biographical or geopolitical information, that would be useful to a college student. They may be revised more often and thus contain more up to date usage. Sometimes the termcollegiate orcollege is used merely to indicate a physically smaller, more economically printed dictionary.
These dictionaries generally contain fewer entries than full-size or collegiate dictionaries but contain additional information that would be useful to a learner of English, such as more extensive usage notes, example sentences or phrases,collocations, and both British and American pronunciations (sometimes multiple variants of the latter). In addition, definitions are usually restricted to a simpler core vocabulary than that expected of a native speaker. All use theIPA to indicate pronunciation.
^The third edition contained "more than 200,000 boldface forms" (entries).[1] The fourth and fifth editions each added roughly 10,000 "new words and senses".[2] It is not clear how many of these were new words.
^First edition titledEncarta World English Dictionary. Second edition also published in the UK asBloomsbury English Dictionary.
^The 2010 "4th edition" ofThe American Heritage College Dictionary (ISBN0-547-24766-4) is the second revision of the original "4th edition" published in 2002; it was originally derived from the 4th edition ofThe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which was published in 2000.[1]
^Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary was originally published asCambridge International Dictionary of English in 1995.
