单选题 This dictionary is for people who want to use modern English. It offers accurate and detailed information on the way modern English is used in all kinds of communication. It is a useful guide to writing and speaking English as well as an aid to reading and understanding.
This dictionary looks rather like most others if you don"t look too closely. Actually it is quite new and different. The techniques used to compile it are new and use advanced computer technology. For the user, the kind of information is different, the quality of information is different, and the presentation of the information is different.
For the first time, a dictionary has been compiled by the thorough examination of a representative group of English text, spoken and written, running to many millions of words. This means that in addition to all the tools of the conventional dictionary makers—wide reading and experience of English, other dictionaries and of course eyes and ears—this dictionary is based on hard, measurable evidence. No major uses are missed, and the number of times a use occurs has a strong influence on the way the entries are organized. Equally, the large group of texts, called the corpus, gives us reasonable grounds for omitting many uses and word-forms that do not occur in it. It is difficult for a conventional dictionary, in the absence of evidence, to decide what to leave out, and a lot of quite misleading information is thus preserved in the tradition of lexicography.
This dictionary makes a break with such traditions. We have gone back to basics and collected many millions of words, and put them into a very large computer. The dictionary team has had daily access to about 20 million words, with many more in specialized stores. The words came from books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, conversation, radio and television broadcasts. The sources are gratefully acknowledged on page xxii. The aim was to provide a fair representation of contemporary English.
No set of texts, however large, can be fully relied on; all the time the information from the texts has been analysed and appraised by a team of lexicographers, whose professional knowledge has also been used wherever there is only a small amount of evidence of the usage of a word or phrase.
The quality of information in this dictionary is different from others. With our textural evidence it is possible to be precise about the shape of phrases and the extent of their variation; the relative importance of different senses of a word; and the typical environment in which a word or phrase is used. Even when statements like this are already familiar, they are made with a different kind of authority in this book.