Idiom/collocation dicitonaries

Which dictionaries about idioms, collocations, proverbs, word combinations, etc. do you use, how good do you find it?

web concordancer?


Lots of my fellow students used to have a little booklet called the BBI collocations or something like that. I never bought it, but recently I had to translate some phrases and I couldn't find all of them, so I started thinking that it might be a good idea to buy something like that. I just thought I'd ask here, before I buy something completely useless.

See. I'd rather have something that covered everything, but I guess it would be almost impossible to find such a dictionary? I do have problems with prepositions sometimes, so maybe the BBI wouldn't be such a bad choice.

The BBI is my Favourite (capital F). It doesn't list all the prepositions but it is extremely useful for ESL speakers because it tells you how to combine nouns with adjectives and how verbs are used (it gives 19 valency categories of verbs). It also gives the most common word combinations, as well as some idioms and phrasal verbs. The dictionary also points out some differences in usage among American English, British English and Canadian English. I strongly recommend it!