Dictionaries can be daunting for the English language learner. Take the definition of 'badger' from a recent edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
'Grey-coated strong-jawed fiercely defensive nocturnal burrowing hibernating plantigrade mammal of weasel family.'
Words like 'plantigrade' will leave a native-English speaker rushing for a dictionary and language learners despairing. (A plantigrade is an animal that walks on the soles of its feet, as opposed to a digitigrade, which walks on its toes - like a dog or horse.)
A.S. Hornby, a quiet- spoken language teacher who spent two decades in Japan, sympathised. He came to the rescue with the first dictionary designed with English learners in mind, published on the eve of war in Japan as the Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary. Badger was simplified to 'an animal with grey fur and wide black and white lines on its head. Badgers are nocturnal (active mostly at night) and live in holes in the ground.'
Hornby was one of the last Britons to leave the country after war broke out and he did so clutching the proofs of his dictionary, which went on to become the best-selling Advanced Learner's Dictionary, selling 30 million copies since first published by Oxford University Press in 1948. OUP China, based in Hong Kong, last week published a bilingual version of the sixth edition of this dictionary, the result of four years of editing and translation here and in the mainland.
Moira Runcie, editorial director of the English language teaching division of Oxford Dictionaries, said that most of those who worked on the monolingual Advanced Learner's had been language teachers who understood the trials of English learners. Entries are designed to be understandable with definitions restricted to a 3000-word 'definable vocabulary'. The sixth edition, published in 2000, was completely reworked - all definitions were revised to reflect how language had changed since Hornby's time. Like any new dictionary, it also boasted an array of new words, such as 'anorak' in the sense of a person being boring; 'stalk' in the sense of stalking a celebrity, and acupressure. There are also many more 'collocational phrases' - words that frequently appear together, such as 'crying shame'.