ABSTRACT
The main reason for this interest in phrases is their essentially didactic nature, so it should come as no surprise that it is in teaching that phraseology has been most developed. However, the reason that Western European dictionaries remained largely alphabetical was the fact that such lexical units, or rather what Moon (1998) has termed ‘Fixed Expressions and Idioms’, are notoriously diffi cult to handle as the sum of the parts is such that it is never easy to know which part an idiom should be listed under. Thus, only gradually did collocations enter dictionaries under their own right, but as they did so, their great combining capacity as revealed by Firth (1957) was still largely overlooked, except in areas where a corpus approach to language had been developed.
