Through a collaborative initiative, Collins COBUILD and Heinle are co-publishing a dynamic new line of learner's dictionaries offering unparalleled pedagogy and learners' resources. The first Collins COBUILD dictionary was published in 1987, thanks in part to John Sinclair, one of the very first modern corpus linguists who personally oversaw the creation of the Bank of English. Every COBUILD dictionary is based on the Bank of English, a huge electronic database of both written and spoken language, which today contains over 650 million words.