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Editorial staff Senior editors: Penny Hands Kate Wild Project management: Lisa Sutherland Contributors: Sandra Anderson Katharine Coates Kate Mohideen Elspeth Summers For the publisher: Lucy Cooper Kerry Ferguson Elaine Higgleton Contents Introduction Guide to entries Pronunciation guide air travel the animal world art and photography bikes boats, water and the coast body business cars and road travel celebrations and ceremonies clothes college and university colours computers and the internet cooking countryside employment environment feelings and personal qualities food and drink friends and family fruit, nuts and vegetables health hotels houses and homes in the home industry jobs and careers law materials maths money music the office personal items plants, trees and gardens reading and writing routines school science shopping society and politics sports telephone, post and communications television and radio theatre and cinema time tools towns and cities trains weather geographical place names irregular verbs measurements numbers/ordinal numbers people of the world times and dates Index introduction Collins Easy Learning English Vocabulary is designed for anyone who wants to broaden their knowledge of English words in key everyday situations. Whether you need English at work, at school or university, or for a holiday, Collins Easy Learning English Vocabulary offers you the information you require in a clear and accessible format. This book is divided into 50 subject areas. These cover such topics as ‘air travel’, ‘business’, ‘food and drink’ and ‘science’, arranged in alphabetical order. This arrangement by subject area helps you to learn related words and phrases together. In this way, you can always be sure of using the right word in the right context. Within each topic, vocabulary is divided into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, phrases and idioms. Each word is defined in relation to the topic in question. For example, in ‘air travel’, the meaning that is given for the word connection is: ‘a plane that leaves after another one arrives and allows you to continue your journey by changing from one to the other’. In ‘computers and the internet’, on the other hand, connection is defined in terms of its computer-related sense: ‘a link between a computer and a network’. For each topic, there are plenty of authentic example sentences from the Collins corpus. These show you how words and phrases are used in real English. At the end of the book, there are additional sections on place names and people, numbers, measurements, times and dates. There is also an alphabetical index, and a list of irregular verbs. We hope that this book will help you to expand your knowledge of English vocabulary in a wide range of situations. For more information about Collins dictionaries, visit us at www.collinslanguage.com. guide to entries Pronunciation guide In this dictionary the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used to show how the words are pronounced. The symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet are shown in the table below. IPA Symbols Vowel sounds aː calm, ah æ act, mass aɪ dive, cry aɪə fire, tyre aʊ out, down aʊə flour, sour e met, lend, pen eɪ say, weight eə fair, care I fit, win iː seem, me Iə near, beard ɒ lot, spot eʊ note, coat ɔː claw, more ɔɪ boy, joint ʊ could, stood uː you, use ʊə sure, pure ɜ: turn, third ʌ fund, must ə the first vowel in about Consonant Sounds b bed, rub d done, red f fit, if g good, dog h hat, horse j yellow, you k king, pick l lip, bill m mat, ram n not, tin p pay, lip r run, read s soon, bus t talk, bet v van, love w win, wool x loch z zoo, buzz ʃ ship, wish ʒ measure, leisure η sing, working tʃ cheap, witch θ thin, myth ð then, bathe dʒ joy, bridge Notes Primary and secondary stress are shown by marks above and below the line, in front of the stressed syllable. For example, in the word abbreviation,/ə,briːviˈeɪʃən/, the second syllable has secondary stress and the fourth syllable has primary stress. We do not normally show pronunciations for compound words (words which are made up of more than one word). Pronunciations for the words that make up the compounds are usually found at their entries at other parts of the dictionary. However, compound words do have stress markers. air travel NOUNS aeroplane [ˈeərəpleɪn] a plane: a vehicle with wings and engines that can fly (In American English, use airplane) aircraft (PL) aircraft [ˈeəkrɒːft] a plane or a helicopter airline [ˈeəlaɪn] a company that carries people or goods in planes airplane (American English) see aeroplane airport [ˈeəpɔːt] a place where planes come and go, with buildings and services for passengers air-traffic controller [eə ˌtræfɪk kənˈtrəʊlə] someone whose job is to organize where planes go aisle [aɪl] the long narrow passage between the rows of seats on a plane arrivals [əˈraɪvəlz] the part of an airport where passengers get off planes; wait in arrivals