Anthony Cowie
University of Leeds
THE ENGLISH LEARNER'S DICTIONARY AND ITS LINKS TO THE NATIVE-SPEAKER TRADITION

1. Introduction: the genesis of the English monolingual learner's dictionary A paradox lies at the heart of the development and publication of the first learners' dictionaries. Though the linguistic research vital to the development of such dictionaries began almost ten years before their emergence - appropriately in a foreign language context, and most particularly in Japan - there was no understanding at the outset that nothing short of a special dictionary for the foreign learner was needed to draw together the various strands of linguistic research - into limited vocabularies, construction patterns, and phraseology - undertaken from the mid-1920s on, under the direction of Harold Palmer, at the Tokyo Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET). The idea of a 'learners' dictionary', in fact of various learners' dictionaries - the term itself is Harold Palmer's - emerged gradually as the research, aimed originally at improving language-teaching syllabuses for middle schools, expanded and diversified.
Leaving aside, for a moment, this central paradox, there is the question of the forms that the earliest dictionaries took. These reflected the methodological priorities of their authors. For example, the first to emerge, the New Method Dictionary of Michael West, of 1935, was designed almost exclusively for the reader. By contrast, Harold Palmer's Grammar of English Words, of 1938, was a highly original dictionary for the writer. This priority was not always openly declared by Palmer, but was implicit in the way his research had developed at IRET since the late 1920s, and in his methodological inclinations. Palmer was chiefly instrumental in producing, in 1930 and 1931, two limited vocabularies - limited in fact to 3000 words each - and later, in 1937, he published jointly with A. S. Hornby a restricted vocabulary of a mere 1000 words (Palmer and Hornby 1937). Palmer held to two articles of faith concerning such word-lists. The first was that a well-selected list of about a thousand words would supply the essential 'encoding' - that is, writing - needs of the secondary pupil. Of course, specialized technical terms would often be needed too, but these could be picked up as the particular needs of the moment required. The second and related point made by Palmer was that the restricted lists which the researchers arrived at contained precisely those words that even advanced-level students have difficulty in using because of the multiple meanings, derivatives, compounds and idioms which they give rise to (Cowie 1999). It is worth adding, by the way, that Palmer and scholars working - chiefly in America - from a different theoretical viewpoint, were broadly agreed in their selection of the first thousand or so words.
We can see how these convictions pointed forward inevitably to dictionaries for production. First, a dictionary grounded in a limited word-stock - and A Grammar of English Words was based on Palmer and Hornby's Thousand-Word English list of 1937 - would fulfil the encoding needs of students, but negatively would not adequately meet their decoding needs. Second, a choice of structurally and semantically complex entry-words, treated in a dictionary in the detail which their peculiarities called for, would help users with the problems of article use, the countability of nouns, prepositional choice, and so on, that typically arise when writing.
The New Method Dictionary and A Grammar of English Words, though in differing degrees, represent a clear departure from even a desk-size dictionary for native speakers, let alone an unabridged historical dictionary such as the OED or Webster's Third International. Indeed, even in the case of the third learners' dictionary to appear, the bilingual A Beginners' English-Japanese Dictionary, by Hornby and Ishikawa (1940), there were marked differences, in design and intended use, between this work and more familiar bilingual titles of the same size and intended readership. For this bilingual work was published in a methodological climate which strongly discouraged use of the mother tongue for the presentation of unfamiliar meanings, a fact which, even as he introduced the new dictionary to them, Hornby was careful to point out to a group of Japanese teachers.
In the light of all these developments, one might ask whether the learner's dictionary - chiefly monolingual but in one case bilingual - of the 1930s and early 1940s owed very little to the native- speaker tradition, and was diligently pursuing an entirely separate course. The dictionaries which I have briefly described were indeed highly original - none more so than the work which Palmer entitled A Grammar of English Words. By the beginning of the next decade, however, a major work for the advanced learner was to appear which, while incorporating many features derived from Tokyo research, was in truth not an entirely original genre but a hybrid. This was the aptly named Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary, of 1942, later to be renamed, for an international readership, A Learner's Dictionary of Current English, and later still, The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English - with an echo, conscious or unconscious, of an older relative with a longer pedigree - the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English.
It so happened that the third edition of the Concise Oxford had appeared in 1934. Was this edition drawn upon in the compilation of the Japanese forerunner of the Advanced Learner's Dictionary (the ALD)? If so, what prompted this move towards the more traditionally designed work, with its rich historical, literary and technical coverage? And again if so, what principles of selection and modification were applied?
But to place this process of hybridisation - if such it was - in its proper context, and to measure its extent, we need first to identify the central defining features of the learner's dictionary, as they emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, and indeed as they have remained to the present day (Cowie 1999). We need to pinpoint what was fresh and distinctive so that any indebtedness to the native-speaker tradition can stand out more clearly. We shall see that what was most new and characteristic was prompted by educational concerns, and informed by modern linguistic understanding. Those concerns and that understanding were the sparks that fired a revolution in lexicography.
I shall look first at the - wholly original - use of controlled definition vocabularies, then at the provision of grammatical information, especially guidance as to the complementation patterns of verbs, and finally the treatment of phraseology, specifically of idioms and collocations. Having asked, as we go along, where and how the native-speaker tradition is profitably drawn on, we finally turn the question on its head and ask: how have learners' dictionaries influenced the mother-tongue dictionary?

2. Characteristic features of the monolingual learner's dictionary
2.1. Limited defining vocabularies
The first monolingual learner's dictionary to feature a controlled defining vocabulary - indeed the only one of the early dictionaries to do so - was Michael West's New Method Dictionary of 1935. The inclusion in a dictionary of such a vocabulary must be seen against the background of West's work as a university teacher and educational expert, some twelve years earlier, in what is now Bangla Desh. Here, West was made aware of a situation in which the majority of school pupils dropped out of the school system, at successive stages, with no measurable benefit gained from their incomplete course of instruction (West 1935). Matters were made worse by the time devoted to developing spoken skills. Reading skills, by contrast, could be acquired more rapidly and more pleasurably, and held out the hope of opening up to all students, and not just a fortunate few, reading materials on practical subjects such as science and agriculture. However, the fulfilment of such a plan meant the development of improved readers based on principles of strict vocabulary control, and later, as I have indicated, a dictionary in which the very language of definition was based on the same principles (Cowie 1999).
Before turning to that dictionary, however, brief mention should be made of West's role in placing vocabulary control within a truly international context. It was on the initiative of West that the Carnegie Corporation organised in New York, in 1934, the first conference to be devoted to vocabulary limitation. By far the most important single outcome of the Conference was the so-called 'General Service List', a jointly produced word-list, drawing on the experience of West, Harold Palmer, and others, which emerged from its proceedings. This later became West's project, and was eventually published in a more elaborate form as The General Service List of English Words (1935). It was to prove of great significance in the evolution of the learner's dictionary, because although it appeared too late to be used in its entirety in the New Method Dictionary, it later formed the basis of the controlled defining vocabulary used in the truly ground-breaking Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), of 1978.
In the run-up to the Carnegie Conference West, in collaboration with J. G. Endicott, had been compiling the New Method Dictionary, with definitions based, as we have seen, on a 'minimum adequate definition vocabulary'. This minimum was arrived at by systematic reduction. A preliminary version of the dictionary was first compiled, in which a vocabulary of 1,799 words was used to define nearly 14,000 vocabulary items. Eventually, the former figure was reduced to 1,490 words.
West's approach to definition led to him adopting a critical stance towards certain defining practices of traditional lexicographers producing dictionaries for native speakers. At the same time, the problems he faced and the solutions he arrived at often had important consequences for the learner lexicography of the 1970s and 1980s. As regards traditional lexicography, West put his finger on some of the characteristic failings of definition in the mother-tongue dictionary, including the fondness for defining the known (say, pencil) in terms of the unknown ('instrument'? 'tapering'?), and the tendency to adopt so-called 'scatter-gun' techniques, whereby the definer 'fires off a number of near or approximate synonyms in the hope that one or other will hit the mark and be understood' (West 1935). You will find some examples of this technique at (1). Notice how, at warlike, "martial" and "bellicose" are less familiar (to many learners) than the headword. For production, the defining words are misleading: martial music is not the equivalent of military music.
(1)
sinuate ... tortuous, wavy, winding (West 1935)
warlike ... martial, military, bellicose ... (POD 4, 1942)
enlace ... encircle tightly; enfold; entwine ... (COD 7, 1982)
As for issues that would continue to be of crucial importance to future pedagogical dictionary-makers, a question of some seriousness was the extent to which one could depend on some degree of clever guesswork, or inference, on the part of the dictionary user. West lists the commonest prefixes and suffixes in the defining vocabulary (for instance dis-, in-, -able and -en) and in the definitions he allows these to be attached to various words, provided the resulting meanings are regular. So the deadjectival suffix -en can be added to hard, soft, rough, and so on, in definitions, on the assumption that the user will be able to work out the meanings of harden, soften and roughen. In this way great economies can be achieved - a lesson that was not lost on later dictionary-makers (West 1935: 16).
I mentioned earlier that the major early dictionary for foreign learners was a hybrid - concerned with decoding as well as encoding. One part of its purpose is indicated by its title - the Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary - where references to idiom and to syntax recall the central concerns of Palmer's Tokyo Institute. They are also a reminder of its dominant interest in production.
However, this would not be enough for the high school, pre-university students for whom the dictionary was chiefly intended. For this group, ISED would need to be a decoding dictionary, too, and Hornby is to be congratulated for recognising these needs and for his skill in meeting them. For the reader, he needed a broad vocabulary, and this was to be found in the native-speaker tradition, specifically in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD), the third edition of which had appeared in 1934.
COD 3 in fact seems to have been drawn on quite extensively. This is shown no more clearly than in the use and skilful adaptation of the Concise Oxford definitions. In one type of adaptation, the definition phrase has the same structure as in COD 3, but uses simpler vocabulary. Look at number (2):
(2)
malevolent, a. Desirous of evil to others. (COD 3)
malevolent ... adj. (Cf. benevolent.) wishing to do evil to others; ... (ISED)
But ease of understanding could depend as much on the structure of a definition as on the words used. In another example, a defining phrase containing a learned noun ('nutrition') is replaced by a participial construction made up of simple words ('not getting enough food'). Hornby also adds a crucial detail - 'the right kind of food' - which is missing from COD 3. See number (3):
(3)
malnutrition, n. Insufficient nutrition. (COD 3)
malnutrition ... n. [U] not getting enough food or the right kind of food. (ISED)
In this work of reshaping, Hornby showed himself to be essentially pragmatic. He consciously rejected West's innovative approach, but nonetheless showed a masterly touch in adapting the defining conventions of the mother-tongue dictionary to meet the practical needs of the foreign student.

2.2. Grammatical information in the learner's dictionary
Harold Palmer was aware at an early stage in his career of the importance of grammatical word-classes such as 'countable' and 'uncountable' nouns and determiners (called by him 'determinatives') in the appropriate use of the language. In fact, by 1917, he was working on an English structural vocabulary 'to be used in a sort of sentence building machine'. As this interesting proposal makes clear, Palmer was aware, though perhaps in a non-technical way, of the generative capacity of a grammar, and that grammatical knowledge was knowledge for encoding, not decoding. Grammatical information has since become a feature of the learner's dictionary thought to be of the utmost importance, and for this reason it is subject to constant editorial reconsideration and revision. We can focus on three aspects here: first, the aspects of the grammatical system which have chiefly featured in learners' dictionaries; then, the extent to which descriptive schemes attempt to take account of syntactic - as distinct from merely inflectional - matters; and, finally, attempts to make coding systems more easily understandable and usable. In considering these aspects, we shall move forward and backward in time, and make comparisons, as appropriate, with the mother-tongue dictionary.
In grammar, Palmer was the leader, the pioneering figure. It was he who introduced the distinction between 'countable' and 'uncountable' nouns into a learner's dictionary - the difference had first been recognised by Otto Jespersen in1914 - and it was Palmer, too, who focused attention on the so-called anomalous finites and the elements of the complex noun phrase, most particularly the determiners - classes which, with due acknowledgements to Palmer, Hornby was later to treat in the Advanced Learner's Dictionary.
The anomalous finites were the eleven finite forms of what are now commonly called the 'primary' verbs (i.e. be, have and do) and the thirteen finite forms of the 'modal' and 'semi-modal' auxiliaries (can/could, will/would, have to/had to, and so on). Palmer's approach to defining these verbs was helpful to the learner since he focused in part on the role they played in forming negative sentences, interrogatives, and so. The examples at (4) show the range of constructions in which the twenty-four forms were shown by Palmer to be used, and those patterns were added to and illustrated in Hornby's 1942 introduction to ISED/ALD 1.
(4)
(a) to form negative sentences: He might go. => He mightn't go.
(b) to form interrogative sentences: He might go. => Might he go?
(c) to form the emphatic affirmative: He might go. => He 'might go!
(d) to prevent repetition by allowing ellipsis of main verbs, etc.: He might go. => Yes, he might.
(e) to form disjunctive ('tag') questions: He might go. => He might go, mightn't he?
The extent of the superiority, both linguistic and practical, that this approach achieved over many mother-tongue dictionaries of the time can be seen by comparing the above details with the treatment of can or shall, say, in the fourth edition of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (POD 4) that appeared in the same year as the first Hornby edition (i.e. 1942). Both of these entries in POD 4 give second-person forms that survive only in dialect speech, thus canst, shouldest, shouldst. The information given is entirely inflectional and semantic, as well as dated: no indication is given of the syntactic uses of these auxiliaries.
More has probably been written in recent years about the 'verb patterns' in learners' dictionaries than about any other form of grammatical guidance that they aim to provide. Here we need to draw a distinction. One the one hand, we have GRAMMATICAL SCHEMES, or DESCRIPTIONS. These are the sets of constructions, elements such as subject and object, and constituent classes such as verb phrase or noun phrase, that a particular grammarian would consider necessary for accounting for the grammar of the English sentence. One the other hand, there are CODES or CODING SYSTEMS. These consist of the numbers, letters, abbreviations, and so on, that are used by the lexicographer to represent, in the clearest and most usable way possible, the various parts of the chosen grammatical scheme. As has often been pointed out, a grammatical scheme will be more successful, other things being equal, if it is based on an existing, widely-known grammar of English, while codes will be more easily accepted if they include traditional labels and abbreviations, such as 'adj.' (adjective) and 'to-inf.' (to-infinitive) (Cowie 1999).
Let us consider some actual cases. The coding system used in the first edition of the Collins Cobuild Dictionary (1987) for indicating verb patterns in simple sentences - that is patterns in which the verb was followed by one or two phrases - was in several respects highly successful. In the first place it used function labels (S, V, O, etc.) made familiar to students in many countries by the grammars of Quirk and his colleagues. Admittedly, the resulting encoded patterns sometimes took up a good deal of space, but the Cobuild editors hit upon the ingenious idea of placing the codes in the column to the right of the main text. Look at number (5):
(5)
give... 1.1 with nouns that express physical actions. EG V + O, OR V + O + O
Jill gave an immense sigh ... He gave a short laugh ...
She gave Etta a quick shrewd glance ... (Cobuild 1, 1987)
Actually, further economy is achieved here, in a way that does not immediately meet the eye. Look at the label 'V'. This is actually used for two different verb classes, simple transitive (one object) and double or di-transitive (two objects). However, there is no need to provide separate verb labels to indicate the difference, since this is already conveyed by the number of objects that are present in the codes.
By no means all patterns can be treated in such a simple and economical way. Among the most difficult are those in which the element after the verb is realized by a finite or non-finite clause, as in: She wanted to help her parents, or He likes cooking Italian dishes. Now V + O, as in the examples from Cobuild at (2), is a 'functional' description: O is a structural element not a constituent class. So why should She wanted to help her parents not be given a V + O code as well (the O part being to help her parents)? After all, Hornby had shown in the 1930s that it is sometimes possible to assign to-infinitive clauses to particular functions. There is no doubt that to help her parents, and cooking Italian dishes closely resemble direct objects that are noun phrases or pronouns, and this is a view I aimed to reflect in the fourth edition of ALD, published in 1989. But there is some resistance to this approach among EFL lexicographers, on grounds of 'user-friendliness'. Several now adopt the policy followed by the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) in 1987. There, an abbreviation refers to the use of the to-infinitive (or the -ing form), as in number (6):
(6)
want ... [+ to-v] Do you want to go now?
like ... [+ v-ing] The children like watching television. (LDOCE 2, 1987)
This concentration on constituent classes - that is on surface detail - actually lessens the encoding power of the learner's dictionary and is one aspect of a shift - a movement - especially in the 1990s, towards dictionary designs that favour receptive use - or decoding (Cowie 1999: 176). But in this respect, learners' dictionaries are still richer than mother-tongue dictionaries. For example, the codes in LDOCE 2 are much more explicit than in that often highly original native-speaker dictionary of 1979, the Collins Dictionary of the English Language. This work, in the entry for like, limits itself to the abbreviations tr. (transitive) and intr. (intransitive) and the examples shown at (7):
(7)
like ... vb. 1. (tr.) ... he likes boxing; he likes to hear music. (CDEL,1979)
Now it is particularly interesting that Patrick Hanks, the editor of the Collins dictionary I have just quoted from, has in more recent times become the person with overall responsibility for the New Oxford Dictionary of English, of 1998. It is especially worth noting that, more than any other editor of a mother-tongue dictionary, he has in that work drawn widely and fruitfully on the foreign learner tradition. This is clear from the treatment of the very same verb, like. Notice how, in the entry at (8), there is a fully explicit label for each pattern and, immediately after each one, a supporting example:
(8)
like ... verb ... 1 ... [with present participle] people who don't like reading books |
[with infinitive] I like to be the centre of attention. (NODE, 1998)

2.3. Phraseology in the learner's dictionary
There are other important respects, too, in which the mother-tongue dictionary has, in recent years, followed the lead of the learner's dictionary - or at least has come to develop in parallel with it. This is particularly evident in the use of large-scale computer-stored text corpora. The first important developments in this area took place in the early 1980s with the establishment of the Birmingham Collection of English Text, which was drawn upon for the first edition of the Collins Cobuild dictionary (1987). Seven years later, the Collins mother-tongue dictionary, in its third edition, was able to make use of the Birmingham resources (which were by then much enlarged, and known as the Bank of English). Meanwhile, at OUP, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, in its ninth edition, drew on the British National Corpus of 100 million words - the same computerised corpus data that was used for the fifth edition of the ALD, which appeared in the same year, 1995.
There is no doubt that, thanks to these huge resources, the treatment of PHRASEOLOGY - or set phrases of various kinds - has benefited in both mother-tongue and learner dictionaries. However, we should bear in mind that even a carefully balanced corpus of 100 million words presents a very modest picture of many idioms that native speakers would regard as very familiar. Just suppose, for example, that you decide to check on the frequency of occurrence of the idiom scared out of one's wits. You'd be wise to search for it by its stem scared out of - , as can be seen from the corpus examples at (9):

(9) scared out of

Only 11 solutions found for this query

The river was shallow, so Jenny wasn't in any danger of drowning; but she was scared out of her wits and soaked to the skin.
I was scared out of my mind.
'A lot of health service managers are scared out of their wits about having to introduce it,' he says.
I'm also scared out of my cerebellum.
She was scared out of her skin the time I was walking along the wall of the prom.
Sonny, I was scared out of my wits.
They didn't talk about it, not to outsiders, not to Gillian because she said it was all stupid and Jamie had probably been scared out of his wits only no one guessed it.
'Incidentally, I met Eleanor this morning and she's scared out of her wits that the fuzz suspect her beloved.'
But there he was, reaching for familiar things, as we all tend to do when scared out of our brains.
Daphne:" I would be scared out of my wits to have a giraffe --; it's a wild animal and far too big for our garden!"
They may have been scared out of their wits as the mob moved towards their hotels but they were not harmed. (British National Corpus)

As you can see, there are only eleven examples of the stem, and even more strikingly, examples containing wits only account for seven out of this total. Most of the other nouns which occur are synonyms of wits: brain, mind and cerebellum, though cerebellum is obviously an unusual, humorous substitution, and for me at least, brain is unfamiliar, while skin is almost as familiar as wits. That is not quite the end of the story, though, because frightened out of one's wits also occurs, and if we search for the stem frightened out of- we find a remarkably similar picture to the one for scared: eleven occurrences in all, of which wits accounts for seven, though with mind and life also represented.
The corpus data tells us which noun - here wits - we must show in final position in the phrase scared (etc.) when we prepare a dictionary entry - though it may leave us uncertain as to which other nouns to mention. What a corpus cannot tell us, though, is which of our eleven examples provide the best illustrations of the idiom's meaning. Here we depend on the lexicographer's skill and experience. There are two chief guiding principles. First, we reject any example whose full explanation obliges us to refer outside the sentence in which it appears (Cowie 1999). This rule is applied for largely practical reasons: there simply isn't room in a medium-size dictionary for more than a very few two-sentence examples. Sonny, I was scared out of my wits (example 6) and, of course, I was scared out of my mind (example 2) would be discarded for this reason alone. And look at example 3: what does the final it refer to?
The second guiding principle is this. We must reject any example which, in addition to the idiom we are trying to define, contains difficult vocabulary. I would throw out number 5 because I could not depend on my readers to understand what the final word (prom.) meant (it is in fact an abbreviation of promenade, and promenades are found along the sea front, but they would only be dangerous to walk along if a strong wind was blowing and the sea was rough). Can we expect the dictionary user to work all this out?
In fact, and focusing on the wits examples alone, only three (the first one and last two) are more or less satisfactory as dictionary illustrations. This is a natural consequence of using 'real' or 'authentic' data. The texts that make up a corpus were written by people who had no idea that their work was going to be used in this way, and who certainly did not have the peculiar requirements of dictionary-makers in mind. They therefore felt under no obligation to spread difficult vocabulary rather thinly. Nor did they take care to ensure that all the essential clues to the meaning of a word were contained within the boundaries of a single sentence. As lexicographers we have to be careful not to ascribe to corpora qualities of sensitivity to our needs that they cannot possibly possess.

3. Conclusion
In this talk I set out to describe the chief characteristics of the monolingual learner's dictionary while at the same time identifying features which are clearly derived from a much older tradition - that of the English native-speaker dictionary. Let me now attempt a summing-up. There is no doubt that at various stages in the history of the genre, and at various points in the compilation of individual dictionaries, editors at work on an EFL project may turn to colleagues working in the same publishing house on mother-tongue dictionaries. Such was the case when Hornby began compiling the first advanced-level dictionary. In more recent times, and still at Oxford University Press, Hornby's successors have sometimes turned to colleagues gathering examples for the updating of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary. But, without belittling this activity in any way, we must bear in mind that over the entire sixty years of their history, learners' dictionaries have been driven by a sense of priorities that are peculiar and almost unique to themselves. As we have seen, the founding fathers, Palmer, Hornby and West, identified a number of features - limited defining vocabularies, grammatical guidance, the provision of very many idioms and collocations - that became defining characteristics of the genre. And despite the very considerable progress that has been made since the 1980s in the development of large-scale text corpora, and of sophisticated data-processing and editing tools, the fundamental character of the learners' dictionary has not changed.
There has, though, been an enormous increase since the 1980s in the sheer scale of EFL dictionary production, both in terms of commercial and technological investment and of the intellectual forces deployed. One measure of recent developments is that since the mid-1990s, the number of major publishers involved in EFL dictionary production has risen from three to five, and that all five are firmly committed to the development of electronic as well as paper products (so dictionaries on CD-ROM and on the Internet as well as in printed form). Another process - and one that can be traced back to the pioneers - is the steadily increasing involvement of linguists in the research activity which, nowadays, is a prerequisite of progress in design and compilation. Lexicographers have their own professional association, Euralex, and it is no exaggeration to claim that a great number of presentations at its biennial conferences are directly or indirectly concerned with learners' dictionaries in the broadest sense.
At the beginning, the learner's dictionary was a dictionary in English, designed for foreign students of English. But it has long since burst its banks. For some time now, foreign learners of Russian, German and Spanish have had access to dictionaries written entirely in the target language. No doubt an Italian monolingual dictionary for foreign learners will soon follow. In the meantime, foreign students of Italian are fortunate in being able to benefit from a work - the 'dizionario scolastico' - originally written in Italian for the benefit of Italians (Cowie 1996). They can do so because, as well as being, often, a rich encyclopaedic resource, the dizionario scolastico has many of the features of a first-rate EFL dictionary: excellent thematic pictures, and sets of vocabulary items grouped together according to subject - building, fishing, football - and according to the relations of synonymy and antonymy existing between the individual items. Such dictionaries also benefit from a tradition well established in Italy - of providing, through innumerable short examples, an exceptionally rich treatment of collocations. British lexicographers have much to learn from the 'scolastico' tradition, just as Italian lexicographers will no doubt come to draw, in a more direct way, on the English pedagogical tradition.


References
A. The earliest learners' dictionaries
Hornby, A. S., Gatenby, E. V., and Wakefield, H. 1942. Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary. (Photographically reprinted and published as A Learner's Dictionary of Current English by Oxford University Press, 1948; subsequently, in
1952, retitled The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English.) Tokyo: Kaitakusha. (ISED/ALD 1)
Hornby, A. S. and Ishikawa, R. 1940. A Beginners' English-Japanese Dictionary. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Palmer, H. E. 1938. A Grammar of English Words. London: Longmans, Green.
West, M. P. and Endicott, J. G. 1935. The New Method English Dictionary. London: Longmans, Green.

B. Other learners' dictionaries
Cowie, A. P. (ed.) 1989. Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. (Fourth edition.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. (ALD 4)
Crowther, J. (ed.) 1995. Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English.
(Fifth edition.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. (ALD 5)
Sinclair, J. M., Hanks, P., Fox, G., Moon, R., and Stock, P. (eds.) 1987. Collins
Cobuild English Language Dictionary. (First edition.) London & Glasgow: Collins. (Cobuild 1)
Summers, D. (ed.) 1995. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (Third edition.) London: Longman. (LDOCE 3)
Summers, D. and Rundell, M. (eds.) 1987. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (Second edition.) London: Longman. (LDOCE 2)

C. Some mother-tongue dictionaries
Fowler, H. W. and Le Mesurier, H. G. (eds.) 1934. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. (Third edition.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. (COD 3)
Hanks, P. (ed.) 1979. Collins Dictionary of the English Language. (First edition.) London & Glasgow: Collins. (CDEL)
Le Mesurier, H. G. and McIntosh, E. (eds.) 1942. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English. (Fourth edition.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. (POD 4)
Makins, M. (ed.) 1994. Collins English Dictionary. (Third edition of CDEL.) London: HarperCollins. (CED)
Pearsall, J. (ed.) 1998. The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (NODE)

D. Other references
Cowie, A. P. 1996. 'The "Dizionario scolastico": a Learner's Dictionary for Native Speakers.' International Journal of Lexicography 9.2: 118-31.
Cowie, A. P. 1999. English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: a History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Palmer, H. E. 1933. Second Interim Report on English Collocations. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Palmer, H. E. and Hornby, A. S. 1937. Thousand-Word English. London: George Harrap.
West, M. P. 1935. Definition Vocabulary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
West, M. P. 1953. A General Service List of English Words. London: Longmans, Green.