Sinclair, lexicography, and the Cobuild Project

This paper discusses John Sinclair’s work in the field of lexicography by focussing on the first edition of the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987), which was written within the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, and of which Sinclair was Editor in Chief. It provides theoretical and lexicographical background to the Cobuild Project, and reviews aspects of the first dictionary which were especially innovative, including its corpus basis, treatment of phraseology, and approach to the representation of meaning. It concludes by reflecting on the overall impact of Cobuild and Sinclair’s ideas.