"Who has eaten of the pot knows the taste of the broth" In praise of monolingual English dictionaries

This article traces the history of the main English dictionaries and points out the advantages for learners of the language of using a modern monolingual dictionary. Drawing on authentic student texts, it identifies two common errors, the confusion of "find/find out" and the use of "have the possibility to" and shows that a corpus-based dictionary can help distinguish between the former and how a collocation dictionary can be an aid to choosing appropriate verb+noun combination in the latter.