It is well known that a dictionary is indispensable for any language, for it alone lists and explain the words of a language or give equivalent words in another language.

The Regional Institute of English, South India (RIESI), a premier language Institute in South India, has been promoting English language education since 1963. As an apex body, it has been training English teachers and thus promoting effective teaching and learning in English. Some of the Institute’s principal aims are the development of a cross-curricular approach to language teaching and learning; helping learners to pick up multilingual nuances; and helping them easily understand texts in English. Therefore, taking into consideration the needs of teachers and learners of the English language at the primary, secondary and higher secondary levels, the Institute has brought out a dictionary that will not only promote the learning of English but will also facilitate vocabulary development in four regional languages, namely, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.

The dictionary compilation work began with the formation of a corpus of 10,000 words, which also included derivatives. Practicing teachers were involved in this work. This corpus was later enriched by a list of 3,500 words identified by RIESI (and published in book form) as the basic vocabulary required by teachers at the primary, secondary and higher secondary levels. However, subsequent interactions with dictionary compilers and language specialists led to considerable modification of this corpus, and it was cut down to 7,500 entries.

A dictionary can help the reader become aware of the richness of a language, the characteristic features of words and the different meanings of the same words, besides familiarizing the reader with their usage. The Learners Multilingual Dictionary has the following well-laid-out objective:

• to help learners pronounce English words correctly
• to enable them to accurately use the languages given here
• to help them understand the mother tongue / regional language equivalent and its pronunciation, given in transliterated form
• to enrich their vocabulary
• to help the teaching-learning community at large