ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the previous chapter we noted that it is information about the meaning of words that we most expect to find in a dictionary. And yet there is at the same time an expectation that the dictionary will tell us how to ‘use’ words correctly. Clearly that involves knowing the meaning of a word so that it can be used appropriately, in the context of other words; but it must also involve knowing what the grammatical possibilities of a word are, as well as the situational contexts for which the word is appropriate. If we also take account of the recording function of dictionaries, then it is not surprising that they contain much more than just definitions. In this function we need to see the dictionary in relation to other descriptive works about language, especially grammars. At the level of word, grammars describe how classes (or subclasses) of words operate in the grammatical structure of language, whereas dictionaries treat words as individual units and describe how they operate idiosyncratically in the language.
