This is a new edition with completely, up-to-date text to take young readers into 2000. Specially written for 8 year olds and upwards, its main features are: 20,000 headwords in colour; 150 colour illustrations; extensive coverage of core vocabulary; information on word origins given; written in a clear style with definitions children can understand and with example sentences playing a key role; and naturalness of examples supported by British National Corpus. It meets the school curriculum requirements and has been extensively trialled and tested in schools.