The Codification of Usage by Labels Maarten Janssen, Frank Jansen, Henk Verkuyl 1. What is a label? In order to get a clear picture of the notion of label let us consider an example of a lexical entry taken from a well-known English-English dictionary: 1 diffuse (difiu.z), v. 1526. [-diffus-, pa. ppl. stem of L. diffundere; see prec.] †1. To pour out as a fluid with wide dispersion; to shed –1734. 2. To pour or send forth as from a centre of dispersion; to spread widely, shed abroad, disperse, disseminate 1526. fig. to dissipate 1608. 3. to ex- tend or spread out (the body, etc.) freely (arch. and poet.) 1671. 4. intr. (for refl.) To be or to become diffused, to spread abroad (lit. and fig.) 1653. 5. Physics. To intermingle, or (trans.) cause to intermingle, by dif- fusion 1808. 6. to distract. Lear I,iv. 2. 1. Temp.iv,I 79. 2. D. thy riches among thy friends, JOHNSON. To d. ge- niality around one MASSON. 3. See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused MILT. Sams, 118. … The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles.1972 The entry contains pieces of information such as (v.), (1526), (fig.), (intr.), (poet.), (arch.), (Physics), (†), (refl.), (lit.), (adv.) and (trans.), mostly abbrevi- ated. In most dictionaries we find similar indications: (dial.), (inf.), (coll.), (loc.), (vulg.), (Am. Eng.), (Art), etc. 2 They are generally called labels. Some of them are connected to formal aspects of the word, some of them to its meaning. To make this more precise, if one considers an entry as a form- meaning pair <f,m>, then labels like (v.), (pl.), (refl.), etc. are generally consid- ered as belonging to the f-side. They concern a specific form or subform of the headword to which a certain meaning is given. Labels like (trans.) and (intr.) are formal from the grammatical point of view: they concern information about the format in which a certain verb needs a direct object or not to express 1 We will use the term entry for the whole article ( = headword or catchword + definition) and the term headword for the word form described in the entry. 2 This footnote will contain all the labels used in the present chapter. We will order them alphabe- tically: † = obsolete, 1526 = first occurrence in 1526, adv. = adverbial, Am.Eng= American English, Angl. = Anglicism, arch. = archaic, coll. = colloquial, fig. = figurative, Gall. = Gallicism, Germ. = Germanism, inf. = informal, intr. = intransitive, lit. = literary, loc. = local, off. = offensive, pej. = pejo- rative, poet. = poetic, refl. = reflexive, reg. = regional, trans. = transitive, v. = verb, n. = noun, vulg.= vulgar. In the text we will write all labels x that we are going to discuss uniformly as (x).