This is no help at all – in fact, it is positively confusing. The problem here is that the dictionary hasn’t caught up with changes in the language.Cognitive psychology learning and memory the phrase gaining traction is now often used in the media to talk about ideas that are becoming more popular or more widely accepted. Yet many of the online dictionaries have failed to record this recent development.Cognitive psychology learning and memory you can find those older meanings in macmillan dictionary, too, but the first one you see is the gain traction one – because the language data shows that this is overwhelmingly the most common use of traction in contemporary english.Cognitive psychology learning and memory there is a clear link between the frequency of a word (or meaning) and its usefulness, and macmillan dictionary takes frequency very seriously.Cognitive psychology learning and memory one of our signature policies is to clearly indicate the relative frequencies of words, and to provide especially detailed information for the most common 7500 words in english (what we call ‘ red words’), which make up the core of the language.Cognitive psychology learning and memory

But this is only half the story. We may want to check what a word means, but if we want to use the word ourselves when we write or speak, we need to know how it behaves.Cognitive psychology learning and memory in the last 30 years or so, our understanding of language has been revolutionized by the availability of huge language databases (called ’corpora’) which can be analysed using powerful linguistic software.Cognitive psychology learning and memory this enables us to observe language in use on a massive scale, and to see how people use words when they communicate with one another. And one of the big findings which has emerged from corpus linguistics is that words often don’t carry much meaning on their own.Cognitive psychology learning and memory instead, meanings are created by combining words in ways which are (for fluent speakers) quite predictable. This is why traction acquires a new and specific meaning when it’s combined with gain.Cognitive psychology learning and memory and it’s why we say we ‘enjoy doing something’ (rather than ‘enjoy to do it’), or why we’re likely to read that ‘the police conducted a thorough investigation’ (rather than ‘did a big investigation’).Cognitive psychology learning and memory when you are engaged in producing text (as opposed to simply understanding it), it is combinations like these – syntactic or collocational – that make the difference between just-about-adequate english and language that sounds natural and idiomatic.Cognitive psychology learning and memory

Corpus evidence shows that people often ‘lexicalize’ their thoughts (that is, put meanings into words) using a multiword expression rather than a single word.Cognitive psychology learning and memory phrasal verbs are an obvious example: in most contexts, stick out is a more natural choice than protrude, and we’re more likely to say put up with than tolerate.Cognitive psychology learning and memory neither expression has any obvious connection with stick or put, but in traditional dictionaries (whether paper or digital), you would have to search for these phrasal verbs in the (very long) entries for those verbs.Cognitive psychology learning and memory in macmillan dictionary, they get their own distinct entries – not just because that makes them easier to find, but because we recognize that they are words in their own right.Cognitive psychology learning and memory

In the same way, it’s common to express the idea that something is usually the case by saying it happens nine times out of ten. This has its own entry too, so if you come across this expression, you won’t have any trouble finding it in the dictionary.Cognitive psychology learning and memory but how will you know about it if you’ve never seen it? This is where you need a good thesaurus, and we have recently launched macmillan thesaurus to complement the dictionary.Cognitive psychology learning and memory type in a search word like usually, and you’ll see a range of synonyms – some of them single words (like generally or mostly), and others phrases ( nine times out of ten, as a rule).Cognitive psychology learning and memory our thesaurus makes no distinction between words and phrases because both are equally natural ways of expressing an idea. This fantastic new resource is closely linked to the dictionary, so that you can move between the two without even noticing.Cognitive psychology learning and memory keeping up with language change

All languages change over time, and as one of the world’s major languages, english is changing faster than most.Cognitive psychology learning and memory being online means that dictionaries can add new words and phrases as they emerge – but (as we saw in the case of traction) not all of them do.Cognitive psychology learning and memory the macmillan dictionary team use smart corpus software to help us identify new uses, but we have another valuable resource at our disposal: the people who use our dictionary.Cognitive psychology learning and memory the open dictionary is a platform where our users can send us their suggested additions, based on words they have seen or heard which don’t yet appear in macmillan dictionary.Cognitive psychology learning and memory this crowdsourced dictionary complements the work of our lexicographic team and has already been responsible for over 6000 new entries in the main dictionary, helping us stay bang up to date.Cognitive psychology learning and memory conclusion