ABSTRACT
Dictionaries are popularly conceived as reference works in which we look up the meaning of words. Giving meanings is seen as the central function of dictionaries. And dictionary definitions are accounts of meaning, the attempt to express the meaning of each word distinctively. However, as we have seen in Chapters 5 and 7, the meaning of a lexeme involves not just what it denotes intrinsically, but also its relations with other words of similar or opposite meaning in the same lexical field or semantic domain, as well as its relations with words that regularly cooccur with it in collocations. Although dictionary definitions do on occasions take account of both these aspects of meaning, the alphabetical arrangement of the dictionary restricts the extent to which lexical field relations can be fully invoked, and information on collocations is at a relatively elementary stage for it to be of much benefit to lexicographers.
