ABSTRACT
The importance of corpora in ELT dictionaries has grown steadily. At first the emphasis was on corpora of written native-speaker English, but more recently spoken English and then learners' English have become the subject of corpus analysis. ELT dictionaries have always tended to be at the forefront of lexicographical development. They have made early use of corpus analysis, they are often the first dictionaries to record new usages, and they take notice of developments in grammatical analysis and grammatical presentation. It took a long time for this error information to appear as explicit information in ELT dictionaries. Explicit error information was first seen in the form of usage notes, where there was a particular well-known student error. The Longman Learners' Corpus (LLC) has already been very useful to us in compiling the Longman Essential Activator (LEA), and it is opening up very rich possibilities for future ELT dictionary projects.
