The significance of “meaning” goes beyond word level, and few disciplines, if at all, would do away with the knowledge and principles of semantics in their spoken and written discourse.

An Illustrative Dictionary of Semantics (ILLUDS) aims to provide language researchers with the main key terms as well as terminologies and phrases which may even have a slight or indirect relation to semantics and appear in Linguistics course books and references. This reference is the first of this kind in content, approach and scope.

There are 1267 entries in this dictionary. The main entries are basically the key terms used in the field of semantics. However, there are cases of literary and purely linguistic terms which are also presented as main entries from a semantic point of view. That is, they are defined because of their indirect relation to semantics, and because they facilitate the understanding of other “semantic” entries. Phonemic descriptions, cross references and further readings are also provided.