Book excerpt: Designed to help lexicographers compile better dictionaries of English, this book provides information about the language that is not available in any other single source. It is the first serious attempt to describe in detail the lexical and grammatical differences between American and British English and offers a trailblazing solution to the vexing problem of how to treat General American and British RP pronunciation in the same dictionary with the help of a Simplified Transcription for which any typewriter keyboard can be adapted and a pioneering description of the principles concerning the treatment of fixed grammatical and lexical collocations in future general-purpose dictionaries of English.