The Role of Corpora in Compiling the Cambridge International Dictionary of English

The interaction between corpora and lexicons in compiling a monolingual learner dictionary, based on the experience of writing the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995). Exploitation of search facilities, statistical collocation analysis and analysis of syntactic patterns in a grammatically tagged corpus. Some limitations of corpus-based lexicography. Ways in which dictionary data was exploited in the analysis and enhancement of the corpus. In this project the corpora, software and dictionary were developed simultaneously rather than sequentially. An advantage of this way of working was that the evolution of the software was constantly guided by the needs of lexicographers, and a number of desirable avenues of development for the software tools and for the corpus itself were identified.