Learner's Dictionaries of English. An overview (PDF)

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Linguistik, Note: 1,7, Universität Bayreuth, Veranstaltung: Proseminar Lexicography, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Learner's Dictionaries are only about half a century old. Back in the 1930's a need for better language teaching tools developed.
A.S. Hornby worked out the first major general-purpose dictionary of this kind in 1942, which was first called the Idiomatic and Syntactic Dictionary of English, later on in 1948 A Learner's Dictionary of Current English and was at last published in 1952 as The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. The the was replaced from the third edition on by Oxford and the dictionary is now known as the OALD.
In 1978 Longman developed a more innovative Learner's Dictionary: the Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). In contrast to the OALD the LDOCE only used a defining vocabulary of 2000 words that were listed at its back. Furthermore it explained more modern words for example current idioms, slang and colloquialisms. The only disadvantage of this dictionary was the "over-complex system of grammatical codes" (see Robert Allen 1996, p.41), which was improved in the second edition from 1987 and the third edition, published in 1995.