The ''Collins English Dictionary'' is a printed and online
dictionary of English. It is published by
HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News C ...
in
Glasgow
Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popu ...
.
The edition of the dictionary in 1979 with
Patrick Hanks as editor and
Laurence Urdang as editorial director, was the first British English dictionary to be typeset from the output from a computer database in a specified format. This meant that every aspect of an entry was handled by a different editor using different forms or templates. Once all the entries for an entry had been assembled, they were passed on to be keyed into the slowly assembled dictionary database which was completed for the typesetting of the first edition.
In a later edition, they increasingly used the Bank of English established by John Sinclair at
COBUILD to provide typical citations rather than examples composed by the
lexicographer.
Editions
The current edition is the 13th edition, which was published in November 2018. The previous edition was the 12th edition, which was published in October 2014. A special "30th Anniversary" 10th edition was published in 2010, with earlier editions published once every 3–4 years.
CollinsDictionary.com
The unabridged ''Collins English Dictionary'' was published on the web on 31 December 2011 on CollinsDictionary.com, along with the unabridged dictionaries of French, German, Spanish and Italian.
[Collins launches free dictionary site](_blank)
' Wired UK'', 3 January 2012. The site also includes example sentences showing word usage from the Collins Bank of English Corpus, word frequencies and trends from the Google
Ngrams project, and word images from
Flickr.
In August 2012, CollinsDictionary.com introduced crowd-sourcing for neologisms,
whilst still maintaining overall editorial control to remain distinct from
Wiktionary
Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a num ...
and
Urban Dictionary. This followed an earlier launch of a discussion forum for neologisms in 2004.
In May 2015, CollinsDictionary.com added 6,500 new
Scrabble words to their Collins Official Scrabble Wordlist. The words are based on terms related to and influenced by slang, social media, food, technology, and more.
References
External links
CollinsDictionary.com– ''Collins English Dictionary'', ''American English Dictionary'',
Thesaurus .
{{Dictionaries of English
Online English dictionaries
William Collins, Sons books
1979 non-fiction books