What should a learner's dictionary include ? : an evaluative study of the quality and effectiveness of three English-English learners dictionaries

الملخص EN

The present study aims at the comparison and contrast of three monolingual (English-English) dictionaries namely: Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (CCELD) and Cambridge International Dictionary of English, with the learner in mind.

It has been found that there are differences in presenting lexical items in each of the three dictionaries, which prompted me to invent a heuristic checklist against which each dictionary is evaluated with reference to twenty six representative lexical items chosen at random.

Wliile CCELD has been evaluated as No.

1 among the three dictionaries, the research is not meant to prefer one dictionary to another as much as to re\>eal the characteristics that can meet the persisting needs of the learner.

Based on linguistic and statistical analysis, the discussion of the research results, indeed, concludes that a good learner's dictionary is more than a paraphrase a word.