ABSTRACT
The monolingual English learners’ dictionary for intermediate and advanced users has enjoyed a long and successful history. A. S. Hornby’s Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (ISED) of 1942 is usually regarded as the first milestone in this highly innovative branch of lexicography, which keeps producing new editions of learners’ dictionaries on a regular, almost yearly, basis. The lucrative market has long been dominated by the British publishers Oxford University Press, Pearson Longman, Collins COBUILD, Cambridge University Press and Macmillan ELT, with Merriam-Webster as the most recent and only American competitor.
