TomTom COBUILD English Dictionary

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Collins Cobuild English Dictionary |

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Runs on:Psion Revo, Revo Plus, Series 5,
Series 5mx, Series 7, netBook,
Ericsson MC218, Diamond Mako,
Osaris, Geofox
Languages: English

Also available for:

See also: Ordering, Upgrade, English-French,
English-German, French-German,
English-Italian, English-Spanish
Collins© Dictionaries are widely acclaimed for their excellence, their continuing innovation and for their tireless reflection of today's language. Collins© COBUILD sets the highest standards with their modern English dictionary. This complete and powerful interactive 2,500,000-word resource is the ultimate electronic reference guide, helping you to find up-to-date words and meanings quicker and easier than ever before.

The COBUILD Dictionary is a result of 15 years of study, and provides a clear and detailed picture of modern English - the language as it is written and spoken today. It sets the highest standards in presentation and layout. It is the single most valuable reference book available, a powerful resource for all learners and teachers of English.

"... I am a REVO owner and have been using Collins for about a month, I simply love its ease of usage... On the whole, Collins Cobuild dictionary is a very useful application. It has a user-friendly interface and a massive database of words. The bundled games also provided me hours of educational entertainment. On the ending note, I would recommend that you go get this dictionary if you deem yourself to be in need of a good dictionary." Epoccity - Bryon
"... It gives me great pleasure to say that this new product, Collins Cobuild, is every bit as excellent, not only that, but it's useful and also entertaining."
"The company has obviously found a winning formula in terms of ease of use, interface design and "finishing touches" that have been utilised throughout their impressive product range. The excitement has gone, since you can guarantee how good the program is going to be, before you've even used it! CoBuild sticks to this winning formula and is every much as bit the excellent product it should be. Simple to use, fast and certainly fit for purpose. The games, anagram and crossword features add the finishing touches that make this truly high quality product."
"... I must say I am extremely impressed by this product, as a dictionary it is superb, but it's also a very well thought out product which offers some great bonuses alongside it and a clear and user friendly user interface.
This is highly recommended and is definitely one of the best applications of the last year."
Read these and other independent reviews

| Key Features

- Portable coverage of hundreds of thousands of meanings, explanations and example phrases
- Quick and easy word and text search (simply start typing...)
- Hotkey feature - look up a word from any application that supports copying to the clipboard. (i.e. Word, Spell, etc)
- Coverage of over 75,000 references
- Over 100,000 new examples taken from The Bank of English (*)
- New improved grammar information
- Revised and improved pronunciation information
- Information on word frequency included
- Click on any word to find its dictionary entry; click on any symbol, pronunciation or grammatical abbreviation to get further information
- Carefully selected defining vocabulary with examples
- Useful anagram and crossword features
- Full support for all EPOC devices, including color machines
- Wordsearch and Squishman games for leisure

(*) The Bank of English is a unique computer database which monitors and records the way the English language is actually used in the modern world. It is continually expanding and contains over a quarter of a billion words, from contemporary British, American, and international sources: newspapers, magazines, books, TV, radio, and real life conversations - the language as it is written and spoken today.

| Screenshots

It is virtually impossible to show the true wealth of COBUILD using only a few screenshots. Suffice to say it's all there. Easy words...

Difficult words...

Words with many meanings...

Words with few meanings...

Any word.

Apart from making this wealth of information available and easily accessible, the COBUILD application offers fun features like "word of the day", crossword-solving, anagram searching, and in fact incorporates several word games:

| About the COBUILD project

From the COBUILD project papers:
"One reason why so many dictionaries do not use real examples is because they do not have enough examples to choose from. The Bank of English is already over 300,000,000 words. This is important, because it allows our dictionary editors to select real examples from a wide range of instances in the corpus. Authentic, typical and yet not confusing or difficult for non-native speakers. Without a huge corpus you are forced to invent examples to meet the need.
Studies have proved that any true and accurate description of English must be firmly rooted in direct observation of facts, rather than the unreliable mix of impressions, prejudices, unconscious assumptions and idiosyncrasies which shape our intuitions about language.
The Cobuild dictionaries therefore

- record the facts of English where the evidence is clear
- show important aspects of word meaning and grammar which were simply never noticed by linguists who had no data to work with
- focus on features of English which are central and typical: the most widely used grammatical constructions, meanings and phraseology.
- provide lots of real examples showing how these features of English are used
- do not contain invented examples

A comparison of Cobuild dictionary entries with any other dictionary shows clearly how these principles make for clearer explanations, more accurate information, more detail, better balance between the major essential features and the less important subtleties.
Real examples
Take a look at the two examples of the phrase brownie point below:

- They're just trying to score brownie points with politicians
- The boss is pleased -- that's another brownie point

One of these is an authentic example taken from a corpus. Can you spot which one it is?
It's often difficult to identify made up examples, particularly if you are not a native speaker of English. In the Bank of English corpus, the singular brownie point occurs only 6 times while the plural brownie points occurs 76 times. So the example above which shows the plural form is showing a more natural use of the phrase. And the most frequent verb which is used with brownie points in the Bank of English is score. (Earn is the second most frequent.)
The dictionary which presents the second example of the two above is really not showing how the phrase is most typically used in modern English.
Explanations rather than definitions
Here is the Cobuild explanation for the word cutesy:
If you describe someone or something as cutesy, you dislike them because you think they are unpleasantly pretty and sentimental; an informal word.
Why didn't we give a shorter definition? Such as:
cutesy: pretty and sentimental.
Because the short definition (while it saves space) leaves out too much important information about this word. Our explanation tells you that this word shows a particular attitude taken by the person who uses the word. If you call a child fair-haired then native English speakers will not make any assumptions about your attitude towards the child: the adjective fair-haired contains no PRAGMATIC force. If we wrote a definition of cutesy like the second one shown above, you might describe a friend's new baby as cutesy without being aware that this will probably cause offence. Some dictionaries simply place some code such as (oft. derog.) to indicate this pragmatic meaning. In the Cobuild dictionary we explain this fully in the definition. (In fact, we also put a large PRAGMATICS label alongside this explanation.)
Secondly, we tell the user in plain and simple English that the word is "an informal word". We think this is clearer than using another special code (such as "inf") somewhere hidden in the dictionary entry.
Don't bother trying to compare Cobuild's entry for cutesy with other dictionaries for learners... this word seems to have been missed from most of them."

Nice features we added in the new upgrade are:

- Dynamic help - Help has been added to each individual dialog control.
- Case sensitive text search - The option of case sensitive/insensitive text searching has been added when looking for text.
- Collapse when typing - Option to collapse the display when typing, so words can be found easier.
- Multiple word pasting - Option for multiple word pasting. Used so you can paste an entire sentence (or more!) and lookup each word in turn.
- Hotkey feature - With a specially defined hotkey, you can look up a word from any application that supports copying to the clipboard. (i.e. Word, Spell, etc). Pressing the same hotkey will return to your previous application.
- Open/save/delete selection - You can now save and open your selections for later retreival. (This option replaces the Backup/Restore Selection menu options).

| Related products

English-French | English-German | English-Italian | English-Spanish

| Technical Details

Languages | Requirements | Distribution | Suitable for

The application runs in English

The dictionary requires 3.8Mb to install. To include the example phrases requires an additional 2.3Mb. Running the application requires at least 750k.

Immediate download
Price: US$34.99

Psion Revo
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