Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

It then made a perilous wartime journey to Britain where it came under the wing of OUP, which decided it would be the perfect counterpart for the prestigious OED.

A year before publication, Hornby had managed to send an advance copy in sheets of the book to B. Ifor Evans at the British Council, a tough feat during the war.

Ifor Evans offered him a job, and in 1942 Hornby came back to Britain and joined the Council, which posted him to Iran.

The sheets reached Humphrey S. Milford, then publisher to the University of Oxford and effectively OUP's managing director.

Milford saw immediately that the dictionary could fill a troublesome gap in the Press's lists, since it was compiled for non-English speakers and rested on Hornby's solid experience in teaching the language overseas.

With the cachet of the Press to promote it, it could take the "Oxford dictionary" brand to readerships that might be intimidated or puzzled by the more magisterial OED.

Milford also used hostility to Japan to push for a subsidy from the British Council, saying that "the Japanese are very cheap producers" and were likely to capture the market.

Milford applied for a special release to acquire this paper "in the direct interest of British culture and overseas trade, particularly in the non-sterling areas".

The thesaurus was originated in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary 7th edition, where over 200 sets of synonyms were located at specific lexical entries.

[5] Simplified Chinese versions of Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (牛津高阶英汉双解词典/牛津高階英漢雙解詞典) has been published by The Commercial Press since 1988.