A Frequency Dictionary of British English

A Frequency Dictionary of British English provides information about the frequency and distribution of words in British English.

The dictionary presents rich information about word frequencies and distributions in an accessible manner. In addition to textual and numerical information, the dictionary offers a range of visualisations to help understand the statistical properties of words. These visualisations are especially important for pedagogical uses of the book. This book also includes vocabulary exercises for learners of English to activate their vocabulary with the help of the dictionary. The dictionary is based on extensive research on current British English using the British National Corpus 2014, a 100-million-word corpus of contemporary British English developed at Lancaster University. The corpus represents a wide range of genres/registers of spoken and written English, including informal speech, fiction, newspapers, academic writing and e-language.

Additional support materials for this book are available at https://lancslex.lancs.ac.uk

This dictionary is designed to meet the needs of a wide variety of users interested in current British English vocabulary including students, educators, journalists, material developers and researchers.

"If you want to know how frequently words are used in different contexts across speech and writing and with what other words these are associated, you might be interested in a new dictionary ... This dictionary is based on the British National Corpus 2014, a large balanced dataset developed at Lancaster University that represents current British English usage. The dictionary will appeal to those interested in British English for research, as well as for the purposes of language learning and teaching. For students and teachers in particular, this dictionary offers a wide range of exercises to activate vocabulary knowledge ... The dictionary is accompanied by a website Lancslex that allows active engagement with frequency and distribution information about words in British English. The website?s user-friendly interface facilitates effortless word searches and text analysis for examining lexical sophistication."

- Words, words, words: A new Frequency Dictionary of British English, CASS, ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science