Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Change and continuity at COBUILD (1986-1996)

5.1.6 Examples A major feature of the 1995 edition is that all the examples from the 20 million word corpus have been replaced by examples selected from the 211 million word corpus. The examples are therefore more up to date and reflect current real world events and personalities. 5.2 Coverage For the 1987 Dictionary, a rough test for inclusion was a minimum of 6 occurrences from 3 different source texts. For the 1995 edition, this was increased to around 15 occurrences. However, because of the increase in corpus size, the number of references has still increased from 70,000 (1987) to 75,000 (1985). 5.3 New Words, New Meanings Many of the new entries in the 1995 edition reflect changes in technology ('camcorder'; 'multimedia') and in society ('PC' meaning 'politically correct'; 'ethnic cleansing'). Other words have become archaic ('baksheesh', 'golliwog') or have been replaced ('Red Indian' by 'Native American', 'Common Market' by 'European Union'). The 1995 edition includes a new noun use at 'take 42': "Someone's take on a particular situation or fact is their attitude to it or their interpretation of it". An even more recent glance at the corpus revealed a new business use of the phrase 'take a bath' meaning 'lose a lot of money'; so even common words like 'take' need to be kept under constant scrutiny. The 1987 Dictionary listed 'the abandonment of a place, person, or thing' and 'the abandonment of a piece of work, plan, or activity', but the 1995 edition adds a third usage 'the abandonment of an idea or way of thinking

1. Similarly, the 1995 Dictionary covers new uses of 'sad' (If you describe someone as sad, you do not have any respect for them and think their behaviour or ideas are ridiculous; an informal use.), 'macro' (in computing), 'parked' (If you are parked somewhere...) and so on. 6 Back To The Future 6.1 Using A Corpus In 1987, Cobuild was the only dictionary to be produced using corpus data. In 1996, all the other major dictionary publishers claim 76