''Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners'', also known as ''MEDAL'', is an
advanced learner's dictionary published from 2002 until 2023
[ by Macmillan Education. It shares most of the features of this type of dictionary: it provides definitions in simple language, using a controlled defining vocabulary; most words have example sentences to illustrate how they are typically used; and information is given about how words combine grammatically or in ]collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words t ...
s. ''MEDAL'' also introduced a number of innovations. These include:
* "collocation boxes" giving lists of high-frequency collocates, identified using Sketch Engine software
* word frequency information, with the most frequent 7500 English words shown in red and categorised in three frequency bands, based on the idea, derived from Zipf's law, that a relatively small number of high-frequency words account for a high percentage of most texts
* "metaphor boxes", showing how the vocabulary used for expressing common concepts (such as "anger") tends to reflect a common metaphorical framework. This is based on George Lakoff
George Philip Lakoff ( ; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
The ...
's ideas of conceptual metaphor
* a 50-page section providing guidance on writing academic English, based on a collaboration with the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics in Louvain, Belgium
Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...
and using the Centre's learner corpus data
The ''Macmillan English Dictionary'' also existed as an electronic dictionary, available free on the Web. Like most online dictionaries, it benefits from being able to update content regularly with new words and meanings. In addition to the dictionary, the online version had a thesaurus
A thesaurus (: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar me ...
function enabling users to find synonyms for any word, phrase or meaning. There was also a blog (the ''Macmillan Dictionary'' Blog) with daily postings on language issues, especially on global English and language change. An "Open Dictionary" allowed users to provide their own dictionary entries for new words they had come across. The online edition was recognised as a good example of this emerging genre of reference publishing.[Lannoy, V. Free online dictionaries: why and how?, in Granger, S. & Paquot, M. (Eds), ''eLexicography in the 21st Century: New Challenges, New Applications: Proceedings of eLex 2009'', Louvain, Belgium: Cahiers du Cental. 2010, 173-182] The website of the electronic dictionary and the blog were closed on 30 June 2023.
Related publications
* ''Macmillan Essential Dictionary'', a shorter version that contains the most basic vocabulary (over 45,000 headwords)
References
{{Dictionaries of English
Online English dictionaries