Collins COBUILD Resource Pack

This CD was updated to contain the 4th edition of the dictionary, which is also available in paper or hardback.
The Basic COBUILD CD that comes with the paper dictionary only has the following:

• Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (4th edition published in 2003)
• Word Bank of 5 million words of authentic text samples (written and spoken) from the Bank of English corpus

The Collins COBUILD Resource Pack has the above plus it also has the following contents on the CD (This is just a CD with no paper books.):

• Collins COBUILD Guide to English Usage
• Collins COBUILD English Grammar
• Thesaurus containing over 130,000 synonyms

The dictionary has easy to understand full sentence definitions with lots of examples. This makes it very easy to understand a word.

If there is a word in any reference on this CD (see the list below) you do not understand, you can double click on it and look up the definition. Once you are done looking up that word, you can go back to where you were with the touch of a button. To do this with a paper dictionary you have to flip through pages and put in page markers.

This Collins COBUILD dictionary is a talking dictionary that pronounces the words and their various forms. It even lets the user record his pronunciation and compare it with the one on the CD.

The software lets you very rapidly search the index or the text through all the books on the CD (see list below). When you can not remember a word you can search the full text for something related to the word you are looking for and find the word. This is very helpful and something you can not do with a paper dictionary.

This dictionary has a unique English grammar to help a learner of English understand how to use a word. There are entries in the help files that simply define the grammar terms used in this dictionary. Because the CD makes it easy to find the definitions of the grammar terms the dictionary becomes that much easier to use for a native or non-native speaker of English (English as a Second Language (ESL) speaker, of English).

Click here for a sample screen.

A review of the differences between the Basic 4th Edition CD (the one the comes with the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner Dictionary 4th edition and the Collins COBUILD Resource Pack from one of our customers.

Difference between Collins COBUILD Advanced Learners Dictionary on CD and Collins COBUILD Resource Pack.

In the advance learner’s dictionary CD, you have access to the dictionary and the Wordbank.

The dictionary provides the definitions of the word plus the definitions of all the derived forms and compounds of the word. It also offers the full list and definitions of any other word that contains the original word in its definition, illustration or sentence examples. For example, when you look up the word “mail,” other than all the definitions, you shall find tens of compounds such as “airmail” and “blackmail” including their definitions. You shall also find the derived forms and phrasal verbs like “mail out.” You shall also find tens of words such as “box” and “address book,” which in their definition contain the word “mail.” You shall also find 44 sentences that are given to demonstrate other words but also include the word “mail.”

Wordbank provides many sentences that contain the word you’re looking up. There are 602 sentences for the word “mail.”

The resource pack includes the above, plus the following.

Thesaurus provides all the synonyms and antonyms of the word you’re looking up, plus a list of all other words which contains the original word as one of its synonyms. For the word “mail,” the thesaurus also provides words such as “armoured,” “direct,” etc. These words are not mail's synonyms, but mail is listed as their synonum.

English Usage demonstrates where, when, and in what forms the word can be used in American and British English . For example, it is explained how the word “post” is used instead of the word “mail,” in British English.

English Grammar includes many titles that describe the system of rules by which words are formed and put together to make sentences. When a word you’re looking up is contained within any grammar title or its description, such title and description shall be provided to you. When you look up the word “take,” you shall be able to find grammar titles such as “nouns used with take,” and “verbs which can take an object or prepositional phrase,” and “taking the focus off the subject: using impersonal ‘it’.”

• Collins COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (4th edition) including:
  • 2,000 new words that have come into use
  • more examples
  • improved coverage of American English
  • updated definitions to make them simpler and provide a clearer understanding.
• full installation to the hard drive option for fast and easy reference without using the CD. Requires 50 MB free if the audio is not installed and 600MB of free hard disk drive space to install everything.
• Collins COBUILD Guide to English Usage - rapid access to additional information on how to use the word
• Collins COBUILD English Grammar - For a full explanation of English Grammar terms.
• Fast reference to the grammar symbols in the help file Simple easy to understand definitions for the grammar symbols so you can fully understand how the word is used.
• quickly retrieve examples of the use of words in real English text, written and spoken from the Word Bank of 5 million words of authentic text samples
• Thesaurus containing over 130,000 synonyms
• over 70,000 high quality audio pronunciations of headwords, phrases, derived words, and inflected forms
• new record and playback feature so users can compare their own pronunciation with the high quality recording on the CD-ROM
• full text search over all the contents of this comprehensive CD-ROM
• one-click hyperlinking so the user can link quickly and easily move between the dictionary, grammar, usage, thesaurus and Word Bank

Mac Minimum System Requirements:

Operating Sys:	Mac© OS 8.6, 9.0, 9.1, 9.22 or higher but for OS X (see Note below)
Memory:	Minimum 32 MB RAM
Processor:	PPC (Power PC)
Disk Space:	Audio on the CD 50MB free hard disk
	Full Installation: 700MB free hard disk
Sound:	Headphones or Speakers
OS-X Note	For some users this product works fine, others have not been able to get the dictionary to talk. If it does not talk we suggest you try to copy hcp_en.wbx from the CD to Applications (OS9) > Collins COBUILD > Data Also, the software only runs in classic mode under OS X.