Dante

Dante is a new lexical database for English. It provides a fine-grained and comprehensive record of the behaviour of over 42,000 headwords and 23,000 multiword expressions, and includes over 27,000 idioms and phrases. Dante is the product of a three-year lexicographic project, in which the core vocabulary of English was analysed from scratch, using a custom-built corpus of 1.7 billion words. It is a unique resource, providing a systematic description of the meanings, grammatical and collocational behaviour, and text-type characteristics of English words. Linguistic facts, drawn from the corpus, are recorded in over 40 datatypes, all machine-searchable. Every one of these is linked to a specific sense of the headword and supported by two or more unedited corpus examples. Dante was designed by the Lexicography MasterClass and created under its direction by a team of 20 highly skilled lexicographers. The database was commissioned by Foras na Gaeilge.