ABSTRACT
About forty years ago the original Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary could describe that part of the purpose of a dictionary which consists of giving explanations of words as being more advanced than any of the other purposes. Explanation is now that part of a dictionary's duties which is least well performed. Among them must be a dictionary technique deriving from an explicit theory of the comparison of meanings. The methods of this theory come in part from logic and psychology. Systematic lists, such as the Dictionary aspires to - of the meanings of thought and feeling would restart psychology at the point from which it would be most likely to make progress. A dictionary need not be merely an instrument of consolidation, it has pioneering rights also, and it would be fainthearted to acquiesce in the view that any possible meaning is unutterable or any utterance insusceptible of analysis.
