Lexicographic Slips: Gathering and Organising Contextual Data for Dictionary Entries

Abstract

The paper discusses the process of incorporating contextual information in bilingual dictionaries, with especial focus on the task of organising the textual source-material for a Greek-English dictionary. A description is given of the two functions of textual material: as citations in dictionaries to illustrate meanings, and also as the source-material for identifying meanings and writing the definitions. As almost all extant ancient Greek texts have been archived in digital libraries, they can now be searched systematically. In order to use the results as sources for writing entries, the material must also be organised semantically into lexicographic ‘slips.’ An account is given of how lemmatising software has been used to identify and store the original textual passages cited in the Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary, creating a digital archive of slips. This has also been combined with a collection of other attestations identified in the texts, to create a comprehensive library of source-material for a Greek-English dictionary now being written at Cambridge. A description is also given of how the new contextual information gathered in this way is being incorporated in the dictionary