ABSTRACT
Few people involved in lexicography will deny that dictionaries are the raison d’être of their discipline. These artefacts have been produced in large numbers for more than 4,000 years. Apart from dictionaries, they have been referred to as glosses, glossaries, vocabularies, thesauri, lexicons, encyclopaedias, anthologies and resources, among various names. Many of these works have long ago been transformed into dust, and the rhythm of appearance and extinction is faster than ever before in today’s digital world. Nobody knows the exact number of published dictionaries, but we are probably speaking of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of different titles. These works have been compiled with very different technologies and presented on different media such as clay, papyrus, paper and various digital platforms, among them the Internet. They have been designed with a wide variety of purposes and have covered a large number of languages and areas of human knowledge.
