An editorialized report of data accumulated in a study of current American practice in the treatment of problems of usage in general purpose dictionaries. Their descriptive objectivity is characterized as "that of the blind men examining the elephant." Such practices reveal little change from that of Samuel Johnson's 1755 English…

It is argued that dictionary definitions of objects are enhanced by addition of usage information, sometimes idiomatic and sometimes indicating specific functions of the object. This lexical semantic approach is illustrated primarily with the example of the French word "boite." (MSE)

This dictionary is a companion volume to the "Mandarin Chinese Dictionary (Chinese-English)" published in 1967 by Seton Hall University. The purpose of the dictionary is to help English-speaking students produce Chinese sentences in certain cultural situations by looking up the English expressions. Natural, spoken Chinese expressions within the…