Albert S. Hornby

Albert Sidney Hornby (1898-1978) was an English grammarian, lexicographer, and pioneer in the ELT field.

Born in Chester (UK), he was educated at University College London. In April 1924 he went to Japan to teach English at Oita University where he joined Harold E. Palmer in his programme of vocabulary research at the Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET).

Subsequently, in 1933, Palmer invited Hornby to Tokyo as an assistant. Three years later Hornby became the technical adviser and editor of the IRET's Bulletin.

In 1937, along with E. V. Gatenby and H. Wakefield, he started work on a new type of dictionary that was aimed at foreign learners of English, the first monolingual learners' dictionary. The dictionary was completed in 1940 and published by Kaitakusha two years later in Tokyo as The Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary.

Back in the UK, Hornby joined the British Council and after World War II he became the editor of the journal English Language Teaching.

In 1948 his dictionary was reissued by Oxford University Press as A Learner's Dictionary of Current English. The subsequent editions of the dictionary were, and continue to be, a great commercial success in ELT publishing.

The dictionary is now in its seventh edition and is known as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.