Over the past decade, lexical theory, corpus statistics, and psycholinguistic research have pointed to the pedagogical value of lexical phrases. In response, commercial publishers have been quick to import these insights into their materials in a bid to accommodate consumers and to profit from the ‘lexical chunk’ phenomenon. Contemporary British coursebooks now routinely offer a generous and diverse mix of multi-word lexical items: collocations, compounds, idioms, phrasal verbs, binomials, fixed and semi-fixed expressions. But while designers have been enthusiastic about adding chunks to the syllabus, the process of selecting items has been highly subjective and conducted without reference to corpus data. By analyzing the usefulness of lexical phrases in three contemporary coursebooks, this paper offers a lexical profile of the items specified for each course. It is shown that nearly a quarter of the multi-word lexical items specified may be of limited pedagogic value to learners.