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A.S. Hornby's Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English is a dictionary that every English speaker in the world should have at his elbow. It is compiled especially for foreign students of English and their teachers.

The history of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English began in 1923, when Albert Sidney Hornby, then aged twenty-four, went to Japan to teach English literature. He found that his students were reading Shakespeare and Dickens with understanding, but couldn't speak or write English at all well. He found himself teaching the language rather than its literature and, over the years, became more and more interested in the problems of English language teaching.

The dictionaries his students were using gave direct equivalents to Japanese words in English, leading to absurd mistakes and misunderstandings. It seemed to him that a dictionary entirely in English could teach much more. It could show how words are used, bringing them to life in a context. It could set out the rules that govern the order of words in an English sentence. It could explain idioms. Illustrations could be used to add an extra dimension to definitions.

The dictionary A. S. Hornby compiled was set in type by Japanese printers and the proofs were checked, unfamiliar letter by unfamiliar letter, by a Japanese publisher. The first copies were ready just before 7 December 1941, when Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbour, and declared war on the USA and Britain. When this happened, Mr. Hornby was still working in Tokyo, but he was such a respected figure in Japan, and held in so much affection by generations of his Japanese students, that special arrangements were made by the authorities for him to leave with the American and British diplomatic staffs.

Later editions of the dictionary were published by the Oxford University Press: the First Edition in 1948, the Second Edition in 1963, the Third Edition in 1974.

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