This new edition retains the essential features of Michael West's work and brings the text up to date in various ways. As before it explains the words likely to be encountered in general reading within a vocabulary of 1,455 common words. New headwords added for this edition have been defined within this vocabulary and where a word outside it is used, for example as a cross-reference, it is printed in small capital letters. A new pronunciation system uses that form of the International Phonetic Alphabet which is now found in other Longman dictionaries. A further new feature is a label for each headword showing which part of speech is being defined.