Collins German Dictionary

I just discovered that Collins Dictionaries and Langenscheidt have been collaborating since last autumn and a new edition of the big one-volume Collins dictionary is to be published in the UK on May 4th 2004 and in Germany apparently in April. This will be the fifth edition.

Collins Dictionaries is now part of Harper Collins, but it was a different Mr. Collins who started the dictionaries, in Glasgow in the 19th century. 20,000 new words, price £30 in the UK and €54,00 or €59,00 (with thumb index) in Germany.

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Thanks to Susan Siewert for the information. No news as to a CD-ROM version. As mentioned earlier, Pons, with whom Collins Dictionaries used to collaborate, brought out a Großwörterbuch which it developed itself (I believe on the basis of Collins).

4 thoughts on “Collins German Dictionary

  1. Fifth edition? You mean there have been three editions since my Harper-Collins Unabridged (2nd ed.) of 1991? Or is the H-C series somehow separate from Collins itself? In any event, I hope you’ll do a review/comparison of the new one, so I can decide whether to replace mine. Probably not, since German isn’t central to my life and mine is perfectly adequate for my purposes, but if the new one is really really great…

  2. Are you sure it’s the same one? May well be. First in the list of authors is Peter Terrell. I have the 4th, dated 1999. I believe the 3rd was just for the spelling reform, so wasn’t worth getting. So the number of editions is conceivable.
    Dictionary reviews are a difficult thing. The Langenscheidt site (click on ‘Germany’ above, I think) has some pages you can look at. How do they compare?

  3. Well spotted – that’s excellent.

    If you click on ‘English’, there seems to be no reference to that dictionary yet.

    It also worries me that the examples of ‘Info-Fenster’ (an overrated feature used to make dictionaries look better than the other publisher’s) are all English. But surely they must have German ones. They simply assume that Germans are only interested in English ones? They have ten sample pages, but the 5 DE>EN ones have none of these sidebars.

    Maybe Kater Verlag has other pages – but I doubt Kater Verlag would have got round to putting it up yet.

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