The first edition of A. S. Hornby's dictionary, published by Oxford University Press in 1948, represented a great leap forward in the provision of suitable materials for learners of English as a foreign language. As a teacher, Hornby realized that although his students were used to decoding literary texts of a bygone age, when it came to communicating in the modern language, they needed more support than was available from the resources of the day. The dictionary that Hornby produced with his colleagues Wakefield and Gatenby was one of the ways in which he addressed this need. Besides simplified explanations and helpful illustrations to aid understanding, it supplied the information they needed to produce good English themselves: information on how to pronounce words and on how to use them in grammatically correct sentences, as well as good models of usage in examples.