The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) was the first advanced learner's dictionary of English. It was first published in 1948. It is the largest English-language dictionary from Oxford University Press aimed at a non-native audience. Users with a more linguistic interest, requiring etymologies or copious references, usually prefer the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, or indeed the comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, or other dictionaries aimed at speakers of English with native-level competence. History The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, previously entitled the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, started life as the Idiomatic and Syntactic Dictionary, edited by Albert Sydney Hornby. It was first published in Japan in 1942. It then made a perilous wartime journey to Britain where it came under the wing of OUP, which decided it would be the perfect counterpart for the prestigious OED. A. S. Hornby was a teacher of English studies at a small college in Japan; he had gone there in 1923 to teach literature, but his experiences in the classroom drew his attention to the need for sound principles of language teaching. At that time Harold E. Palmer headed the Institute for Research into English Teaching in Tokyo, and in 1931 he invited Hornby to work on vocabulary development at the Institute. The result of this was the Idiomatic and Syntactic Dictionary, published by Kaitakusha in 1942. A year before publication, Hornby had managed to send an advance copy in sheets of the book to B. Ifor Evans at the British Council, a tough feat during the war. Ifor Evans offered him a job, and in 1942 Hornby came back to Britain and joined the Council, which posted him to Iran. The sheets reached Humphrey S. Milford, then publisher to the University of Oxford and effectively OUP's managing director. Milford saw immediately that the dictionary could fill a troublesome gap in the Press's lists, since it was compiled for non-English speakers and rested on Hornby's solid experience in teaching the language overseas. Thus it explained spelling, grammar, phonetics, and usage much more extensively than would a dictionary for native English speakers. With the cachet of the Press to promote it, it could take the "Oxford dictionary" brand to readerships that might be intimidated or puzzled by the more magisterial OED. But the command economy of World War II under which all British publishers were then operating posed a problem: everything was in short