This formulation of "lexicon" includes:
I do not address the issue how encyclopedic a work can be and still be a "lexicon".
The reader with a background in Natural Language Processing (NLP) should be aware that my usage of "lexicon" here has nothing to do with the distinction between "lexicon" and "dictionary" in NLP, as explained in Electric Words (Wilks, Slator, and Guthrie 1996:6):
In this book we continue with the now conventional usage of "lexicon" to mean a set of formalized entries, to be used with a set of [natural language processing --SB] computer programs, and keep "dictionary" to mean a physical printed text giving lexical information, including meaning descriptions."This distinction sees only on the one hand, dictionaries in print form for use by humans, and on the other, electronic-media databases for use by NLP applications. It leaves no place for electronic-media databases for use by humans, and so is not a distinction useful to this work. Moreover, the NLP sense of "lexicon" is incompatible with the meaning this word has in lexicography in general, where it usually refers to dictionaries which are atypical in form or content, e.g., The Analytical Lexicon of Navajo (Young & Morgan 1992), A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon (Albert 1985), A Lexicon of New Red Sandstone Stratigraphy (Taylor 1988), and so on. My use of "lexicon" is based on lexicographic usage, not NLP usage.
It is clear that we are not far from the point at which the dictionary will cease to be merely a product such as a book, or a somewhat more sophisticated substitute for a book, for example, a CD-ROM, which remains as fixed in its contents as a book is, and will become a service. This implies that instead of multiple identical copies of a dictionary, sold to users, there would be a single version of a database, from which clients of the dictionary services obtained the information they required, much as professionals of various sorts already get abstracts and similar data "on-line". [Dodd 1989:87, emphasis in the original]Dodd's sense of an "on-line" "sevice" is exactly what I mean by an online resource, specifically an online lexicon. (The reader may find interesting the fact that while Dodd's comments sound hypothetical, an online lexicon system, the Internet
webster had already been available via
Internet/ARPANet since the mid 1980s; under this system, users
would run simple client programs (called webster(1)
or, later, Xwebster) to query, thru
the Internet, one of the remote servers for definitons or spellings
(Unknown ?1983; Curry 1990, 1996; Mayer 1996; Faith and Martin 1997)).
To rephrase and expand Dodd's conception of "online", I say that if a lexicon is online, it exists not on each user's computer (nor even on a CDROM accessed thru a local network), but instead it is served, across a network, from the lexicographer's computer. While much of my discussion, such as the section on macrostructure, applies to CDROM lexicons about as well as to online lexicons, the sections on interstructure and on editorial issues are relevant to online lexicons but have little applicability to CDROM lexicons.