Finding the right word made easy

Longman's Essential Activator is a completely new dictionary designed for intermediate-level students.

It provides pupils with everything they need to produce both written and spoken language, gives extra help in potential problem areas, and presents information in a visually stimulating and user-friendly way.

It is a dictionary, but not the kind most of you will be familiar with. From a starting point of just 750 basic words - such as Big, Need and Like - the Longman Essential Activator guides you to variants such as enormous, could do with, and be crazy about. Hence your English vocabulary is broadened and becomes more accurate - that is, more like that of a native speaker.

For example, imagine you wanted to find a better expression to use in a sentence than very happy. First, look up the common word which expresses the basic meaning of what you want to say. That is, happy.

You then would find that happy is divided into different options - such as feeling happy, happy because something good has happened, happy because you are no longer worried about something.

In all, you would find six different sections for happy. You then would read the definitions of the words in each section before deciding which was the best for your purposes. It's a very simple procedure.