Collins English Dictionary

• 1. Introduction

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  The Collins English Dictionary arrived in 1979 with a quiet but significant distinction: it was the first British English dictionary ever typeset directly from the output of a computer database. Patrick Hanks edited it. Laurence Urdang served as editorial director. The result was a reference work built on a genuinely new kind of infrastructure, one where every aspect of a dictionary entry was handled by a separate editor working from its own distinct form or template. Once all the pieces for a given entry were assembled, they were passed along to be keyed into a slowly accumulating database, assembled entry by entry until it was complete enough to drive the typesetting of that first edition. That founding database was later donated to the ACL Data Collection Initiative. What does it take to keep a dictionary alive across nearly five decades? And how do you decide which words belong inside it?

• 2. The Living Corpus

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  Behind every edition of the Collins English Dictionary sits the Collins Corpus, a body of language that is continually updated and now holds over 20 billion words. That scale is not decorative. It allows lexicographers to track how English is actually used rather than how people think it is used. In a later edition, the dictionary began drawing on the Bank of English, a corpus established by John McHardy Sinclair at COBUILD, to supply typical citations rather than examples composed by individual lexicographers. The difference matters: a citation drawn from real usage shows a word in the company it actually keeps, not in a sentence invented to illustrate a definition. The Collins Corpus continues to feed the dictionary's ongoing revisions, making each new edition a record of the language as it stood at a particular moment.

• 3. Editions and Milestones

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  The 14th edition, published on the 31st of August 2023, contains more than 732,000 words, meanings, and phrases, along with 9,500 place names and 7,300 biographies. A newer version of that same 14th edition followed on the 7th of May 2024. The 13th edition preceded it, published in November 2018. For most of the dictionary's history, new editions appeared once every three or four years. The 10th edition, published in 2010, carried a special designation: it marked the 30th anniversary of the dictionary, a round number that prompted HarperCollins to celebrate the milestone explicitly. Each edition represents not just a count of added words but a snapshot of which aspects of human knowledge the editors chose to index, from personal names to place names to the vocabulary of daily life.

• 4. Crowd-Sourcing and the Open Web

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  CollinsDictionary.com went live on the 31st of December 2011, bringing the dictionary onto the freely accessible web alongside translation resources covering French, German, Spanish, and Italian. The site drew on the Collins Bank of English Corpus for example sentences, incorporated word frequency and trend data from the Google Ngrams project, and added word images sourced from Flickr. The platform had earlier opened a discussion forum for neologisms in 2004, a small experiment in letting readers flag new words. In August 2012, the site went further, introducing formal crowd-sourcing for neologisms while keeping editorial control intact. That distinction was deliberate: CollinsDictionary.com positioned itself as different from Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary by filtering what the crowd contributed rather than publishing it unmediated. In May 2015, the site added 6,500 new Scrabble words to its Collins Scrabble Words dictionary, pulling from slang, social media, food, and technology.