ABSTRACT
Not surprisingly, publishers balked at the idea that building costly large corpora was necessary to the business of writing dictionaries, and some traditional lexicographers were unwilling to concede that their own intuition might not be adequate to describe the language in general. The use of such corpora for lexicography has been primarily for technical lexicons, while work on translation studies and contrastive linguistics feeds into general bilingual dictionaries more indirectly. The early period of corpus use was a salutary one for lexicographers when it became clear how many senses of words in existing dictionaries were not attested. All good dictionaries for learners of English contain information on collocation, because it is a key aspect of fluent English, and often quite idiomatic and difficult to predict. Learner corpora are used by lexicographers working on learners' dictionaries or bilingual dictionaries. Concordancing learner corpus lines can enable lexicographers to spot errors that learners make with particular words.
