Acknowledgements

I am pleased to acknowledge the helpful feedback from several researchers, lexicographers, publishers, and librarians. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Tadeusz Piotrowski for inspiration, encouragement, and suggestions. I am grateful to Michael Rundell, the Editor-in-Chief of Macmillan Dictionaries, for sharing with me valuable insights into the defining policy of MEDAL and for enlightening my understanding of lexicographic practice in other dictionaries. Thanks are also due to publishers who provided me with the defining vocabulary lists, in particular Wendalyn Nichols, publishing manager from Cambridge University Press, and Kateryna Prokhorova from Pearson Technical Product Support. I also thank Professor Hai Xu at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China, for sharing with me a few electronic versions of vocabulary lists. I would also like to express my thanks to the team of Collins Dictionaries at HarperCollins for supplying me with clues about the COBUILD defining policy.

A large part of the quantitative research reported here has been conducted with the AntWordProfiler program developed by Professor Laurence Anthony of Waseda University, and the corpus database compiled by Professor Paul Nation of Victoria University of Wellington, to whom I acknowledge my gratitude.

In the preparation of this work I made extensive use of several libraries in England and Poland. The research trip to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, was funded by the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) post-doc bursary (type B) awarded to me in 2019. I am much indebted to the members of the library staff at the University of Applied Sciences, Nysa, in particular Bogumiła Wojciechowska-Marek, director of the library, and Krzysztof Balcerek, an inter-library loan officer, for their time and assistance in making research materials available to me.

Special thanks are due to Dr Elżbieta Szymańska-Czaplak, PhD, Dean of the Faculty of English Philology at University of Opole, for granting me the permission to conduct the investigation in Opole. The students of the University of Opole and of the University of Applied Sciences, Nysa, were absolutely invaluable for this study. The completion of this book would not have been possible without their participation in the experiment.

Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the series editors for their detailed comments on an earlier version of this book. Their critical and insightful remarks greatly contributed to the final shape of the book. Needless to say, any mistakes and inaccuracies are my own.