The bottom line is that it has indeed done some lessons, but failed in others. With more than twenty years of electronic dictionaries behind us, and countless reviews of e-lexicographic products, one would hope that Longman would have learnt from the errors of other publishers in this field. In the meantime Cambridge, with its Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (CEPD) published in 2003 (see Sobkowiak 2005 for a review), beat Longman to the prize for the first ever electronic pronouncing dictionary of English. It took Longman eighteen years to prepare the e-version of the dictionary, now in its third edition. As such, it could function as an excellent linguistic resource not only for the general reading public but also for linguists’ (Sobkowiak 1994: 223). I concluded my review of the first edition of Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (published in 1990) with the following words: ‘What is all the more surprising is that Longman do not offer the dictionary in computer-readable form, e.g., as CD-ROM, or on magnetic disk(s).
