million full sentence usage examples, taken from fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, and magazines, help contextualize the words. Each definition has a word frequency graph, demonstrating the historical and contemporary popularity of the word over the last 500 years. The data is drawn directly from Collins' analytical language database called the Collins Corpus and Google Ngrams, which monitors word usage in print and online sources.

The first edition of Collins, in 1979, with Patrick Hanks as editor and Lawrence Urdang as editorial director, used computer databases and typesetting in the preparation of a dictionary.