I still haven't found this 5th edition of Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary in any book stores here in Canada after a couple of months since it was published in January 2006. But I found some helpful comments relating to this book. As for the book, from such description as over 110,000 references and over 75,000 examples (unlike the 3rd edition which contains over 105,000 examples), you can conclude this new edition is not much different from the previous 4th edition. Some new words such as "spyware, blog, iPod" have been added to this dictionary. The great difference from its previous edition is its CD version. The interface has been improved, more friendly and easy to use. What surprised me most is that the editors finally place the phonetic transcriptions into the 5th CD version. Here is a link to a picture of the software.
http://enjoylives.googlepages.com/collinscobuild.jpg
1.How does copy and paste option work? can a learner copy an example sentence from a particular entry? In previous versions of the CD, one could not paste a particular sentence but the whole entry which could contain a large number of expressions and phrases that involved that particular word which was quite annoying for SM users for making sentence items?
2. What is "pop up" option? How does it work?
3. In previous version, one could see phrasal verbs or compound expressions in a separate panel at the bottom if a user searched a particuar word like "get"?
What it looks like by seeing this new version image is that they had added a useful option like "transcriptions" but got rid of other useful options? It sounds like the new version is a duplicate of "cambridge electronic dictionaries. I am not impressed with it, to be honest.
It's seems that the third edition is better, whith a lot more examples, so do you advise me to buy the third or the fifth edition ?
third edition hands down.