Collins COBUILD Dictionaries

Collins COBUILD dictionary range for learners of English is the ultimate learner-friendly resource for reliable, accurate and fast learning of English. If you are studying English as a foreign language, Collins COBUILD dictionaries are the perfect study companions.

Collins, in association with the University of Birmingham, and led by the pioneering linguist John Sinclair, developed the very first corpus of English in the 1980s. This corpus – the Collins Birmingham University International Language Database (COBUILD) – revolutionized dictionaries for learners of English. It became the largest collection of English data in the world, bringing together words from written and spoken English to provide evidence of how English was really used. This meant that dictionary writers no longer had to rely on their own intuition about English, but could check millions of words of data to see, for example, which senses of a word might be the most frequently used, which words ‘go’ together, how words are really used in sentences, and to find authentic examples of English in use.