Corpus Lexicography

Corpus lexicography represents a dramatic change in the relationship between the texts of a language and the descriptions given in dictionaries. Large language corpora, stored and analysed on a computer, have become the preferred source of evidence in the creation of dictionaries for human users. Pioneered by Cobuild and other United Kingdom English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) dictionary publishers, corpus lexicography has greatly improved the accuracy and focus of EFL dictionaries, has influenced native-speaker and bilingual dictionaries, and underpins many national dictionary projects worldwide. The wealth of new information about language revealed by corpus lexicography will no doubt be made more easily available by future electronic dictionaries than by current paper editions.