Regulators are increasingly aware of the practical implication of such phenomena as algorithmic bias, price discrimination, blackbox AI as well as the misuse of the personal information of consumers. The dangers of algorithmic exploitation in the context of mass market consumer transactions is underexplored. The chapter describes how technology-driven exploitative commercial practices have passed under the legal and regulatory radar. It examines the extent recent regulatory addresses the impact of such practices.

Despite the benefits of the convergence of AI in ecommerce, it is necessary to address some concerns. The presence of AI-powered platforms raises significant challenges to consumer autonomy. This chapter discusses the overlap and interplay among three main legal regimes – EU AI Act Proposal, Digital Services Act (DSA), and EU Consumer Law.These laws will need to be amended with new articles to adequately address AI-specific concerns

The term “commercial dictionary” comprises numerous species of dictionary marketed to the public or identified cohorts of the public. Colloquial references to “the dictionary” likely refer to a commercial dictionary. English dictionaries began to develop in Britain along with the development of printing and by the end of the 18th century, the idea of the dictionary as a language authority of practical use to the ordinary person was well established in England. In the US, development of dictionaries began soon after colonial times, thanks largely to Noah Webster. The market for commercial dictionaries flourished and diversified in the 19th and 20th centuries, resulting in a robust and competitive market for them in the US and the UK, which remained beacons of English lexicographic endeavor. With the arrival of computers in the mid−20th century, the commercial dictionary began its slow decline in prominence and authority, owing to the widespread availability of dictionary definitions online via computers and hand-held devices. Today, very few names in publishing are associated with commercial dictionaries and all publishers still in the market have other means of profiting from dictionary data.

User studies have generated considerable insight into the functional dimensions of dictionaries, but dictionaries are cultural artifacts as well as utilitarian tools and must be regarded as having not only users but also audiences. A review of the historical development of commercial and institutional dictionaries reveals the different audiences implicitly or explicitly targeted by dictionary producers over time. Scholarship on the usage of monolingual dictionaries shows that the attributes audiences expect in a dictionary and the power of the dictionary as a cultural institution vary significantly among countries and communities. In the twenty-first century, the advent of electronic dictionaries, dictionary licensing, and social media introduced new complications to the relationship between dictionaries and their audiences. The blurring of boundaries around the monolingual dictionary happened at a time when debates over words and their meaning were increasingly prominent in public discourse over topics such as gender, race, and sexuality, sometimes resulting in media controversies. To remain relevant in this landscape, dictionaries must now consider audience expectations as well as user needs.

What is the stuff of dictionaries? And why does thinking about that stuff matter?  These are the paramount questions of this chapter. The physical print dictionary is a specter that looms large in media and the popular imagination, but dictionaries aren’t just or only big books. Accordingly, this chapter begins by drawing attention to the wide array of material incarnations dictionaries have taken – the tablets and scrolls that preceded books, the websites and apps that have superseded them. Next, it considers the materialities necessary to making and using those various forms: the evolving variety of tools available to amateur and professional lexicographers; the implements of interaction deployed by dictionary readers; the traces of production, circulation, and reception that exist in private collections and informal or institutional archives. Finally, I’ll describe some non-textual uses of dictionaries; just as dictionaries aren’t only books, they aren’t only consulted for their content but rather mobilized to a range of physical, aesthetic, symbolic ends.

The chapter examines the issue of civil liability in the framework of damages resulting from the use of such autonomous systems. A particular emphasis is placed on the importance of access to justice – of enhancing access for victims of harm to remedies and relief – rather than more abstract or conceptual considerations of the appropriateness of a particular regulatory solution

The responsibilitiesand liability of the persons and organisations involved in the development of AI systems are not clearly identified. The assignment of liability will need government to mo e from a risk-based to a responsibility-based system. One possible approach would be to establish a pan-EU compensation fund for damages caused by digital technologies and AI, financed by the industry and insurance companies.

This chapter examines how to manage a dictionary project, beginning with the vital preparatory tasks needed before the project proper can commence: budget approval, headword selection, entry structure and style guide preparation, staff recruitment and more. It then looks at the main phases in a typical dictionary project – entry compilation, translation if applicable, editing and publication – and at how these phases can be translated into a work plan. The latter involves categorizing and grouping the entries, creating work batches, accurately estimating the work effort involved, setting target dates and building the team. The chapter then looks at how the project progress can be monitored, in terms of both quantitative output and quality. An important aspect of this is maximizing efficiency through the use of software tools, statistical analysis, and entry layouts. Finally the chapter looks at select other tasks in a dictionary project: testing the apps, adapting to changing technologies and user behavior, and planning dictionary maintenance.

Beginning with the Romance philologist Yakov Malkiel, scholars have attempted to construct typologies adequate to the description of dictionaries in all their variety since the 1950s. Typologies are useful tools. They require that we abstract the distinctive features of various dictionary types by close examination and comparison of features, and they help us grasp the dictionary phenomenon by organizing it analytically. But typologies have limitations. For instance, on occasion, dictionaries cross types. Recent typologies tend to view the dictionary as a stable genre of language reference work, but people insist on making dictionaries for other reasons: some dictionaries enregister dialects and slang and other nonstandard language varieties, such that the dictionaries are more about maintaining social boundaries and promoting regional or social identities by means of enregisterment. Still others are facetious or in some other way devoted not to reference but to entertainment, not that the two are always mutually exclusive. Because dictionaries tend to confound attempts to typologize them, some scholars have tried to restrict the categories “dictionary” and “lexicography” to exclude the confounding texts and those who make them.

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Sue Atkins, the Grande Dame of lexicography, who passed away in 2021. In a prologue we argue that she must be seen on a par with other visionaries and their visions, such as Paul Dirac in mathematics or Beethoven in music. We review the last half century through the eyes of Sue Atkins. In the process, insights of other luminaries come into the picture, including those of Patrick Hanks, Michael Rundell, Adam Kilgarriff, John Sinclair, and Charles Fillmore. This material serves as background to start thinking out of the box about the future of dictionaries. About fifty oppositions are presented, in which the past is contrasted with the future, divided into five subsections: the dictionary-making process, supporting tools and concepts, the appearance of the dictionary, facts about the dictionary, and the image of the dictionary. Moving from the future of dictionaries to the future of lexicographers, the argument is made that dictionary makers need to join forces with the Big Data companies, a move that, by its nature, brings us to the US and thus Americans, including Gregory Grefenstette, Erin McKean, Laurence Urdang, and Sidney I. Landau. In an epilogue, the presentation’s methodology is defined as being “a fact-based extrapolation of the future” and includes good advice from Steve Jobs.

This chapter treats the design considerations for dictionaries as printed books, the transition from print to digital formats in the thirty years around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the considerations for digital and online formats. Section 1: Customer-focused decisions about format, size, and extent of physical dictionaries; the mapping of book and page components of printed dictionaries; the mutual influence of editorial and design choices; and the advent of digital composition and production for printed formats. Section 2: Factors driving the choice of digital versus print formats for changing customer needs; functional challenges of converting printed dictionaries to digital; design considerations for online interfaces, including both technical performance and user experience.

In its broadest sense, book history is concerned with all the media – electronic, printed, handwritten, oral – in which dictionaries have been preserved and circulated. Lexicography began at a particular point in the development of the book, and many topics in the global history of lexicography are book-historical topics. One of the most fundamental of these is the distinction, seen in western and non-western traditions alike, between dictionaries which are made to support ready reference, and dictionaries which are made to support slower, more thorough, study. Another is the distinction between the dictionary text as a single entity, and the body of lexicographical material as a repertoire from which different selections can be made on different occasions. Another is the dependence of the textual structure of the dictionary as we know it on the physical structure of the codex (as opposed to scrolls, clay or wooden tablets, and other media). These topics are of evident continuing relevance to the compilers, publishers, and users of dictionaries in electronic form.

This chapter examines diverse aspects of new technologies that are disrupting traditional consumer protection. These include phenomena such as consumer profiling or commercialization of data. It can be concluded that artificial intelligence represents a particular challenge for consumer law and policy. Consumer law should be technologically neutral. Irrespective of the technology deployed, the level of consumer protection needs to be always maintained. However, consumer law requirements must never be seen as obstacles to the innovation and the development of new technologies; and establishing the right balance between these two values remains a particular challenge.

The complications of usage in general dictionaries and the complications of dictionaries in specialized dictionaries of usage. Superficially, usage refers to “good usage” or correctness judgments about language variation, like lie vs. lay, and general dictionaries have tried to signal such judgments for some words. Yet usage also refers to “actual usage,” “contextual usage,” and “traditional usage,” which are all bound up with the simpler notion of “good usage.” The first part of this chapter elaborates these types of usage, the relationships among them, and the ways general dictionaries have incorporated all four types. The second part focuses on specialized dictionaries that focus exclusively on usage issues in all four senses. Such dictionaries vary widely in their macro-structures and micro-structures, and the chapter provides a framework for discerning elements within the entries. Dictionaries of usage are usually better than general dictionaries in giving detailed explanations and treating more issues and more kinds of issues. They do not seem to have improved on general dictionaries for identifying the most important usage issues to be aware of.