Far from being cut-down versions of the adult form, children’s dictionaries constitute a distinct genre with their own history and methodology. The chapter charts their development, from Renaissance bilingual dictionaries to the present day, showing how they have evolved to reflect changing perceptions of childhood. It discusses the bewildering range of dictionaries now available for children as they progress from ABCs and picture dictionaries to those for school use and creative writing, including innovative subgenres based on fictional worlds and dictionaries supporting language revitalisation. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, the chapter explores content and page design adapted to engage young readers. It considers how lexicographers aim to reflect the world as experienced by children, from the selection of headwords to the framing of definitions, using dedicated corpora and reading programmes. The tension between descriptive and prescriptive approaches is often acute in children’s dictionaries, for example over the inclusion of slang and taboo words, and lexicographers aim to balance young dictionary users’ needs against adult perceptions of what a children’s dictionary is for.

Dictionaries are works of literature: they have an author, a plot, and a narrative. They have also been the object of fascination of writers–poets, novelists, and essayists– from diverse languages, from Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, Denis Diderot, and Gustave Flaubert, to Czeslaw, George Orwell, George Perec, William Thackery, and Voltaire. At times, the structure of a lexicon is emulated in a work of fiction; in others, it is at the heart of a storyline. This meditation explores the wide range of tributes dictionaries have occasioned as well as volumes about the making of specific lexicons, such as the Oxford English Dictionary.

Intellectual history and lexicography are related to each other in multiple ways. Intellectual historians study dictionary entries as documents of the thought – for instance, the political thought – of the past. They may also attend to broader questions of dictionary structure: how did a given lexicographer think about taxonomy? Sometimes lexicographers themselves construct dictionaries as contributions to intellectual history. And the history of dictionaries is part of the history of intellectual institutions (publishing houses, universities and academies, religious bodies, and so on), which have regularly determined the scale, the metalanguage, the degree of encyclopedic content, and the relationship to canons of literature, of the lexicographical work which they sponsored. These points have very wide-ranging implications: dictionaries ultimately belong to a global intellectual history.

In this chapter, we are interested in how AI may enhance our well-being – or do the opposite. A defintion of well-being and promotion of core vlaues will be discussed. It will then survey AI technologies and assess whether they enhance or diminish human well-being, using the different meanings of well-being

A late-medieval Anglo-Saxon manuscript glossary, illustrated with some drawings to clarify meanings, introduces a tradition of pictorial illustration in printed English dictionaries, a tradition that began on a small scale in the seventeenth century, when it first received theoretical justification. Although the leading lexicographer Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and the authoritative New (later Oxford) English Dictionary in the nineteenth century eschewed pictorial illustration, such images flourished in encyclopaedias and also in dictionaries produced by the Merriam-Webster Co. in the US. During the twentieth century special dictionaries for students of English as a second language, including several published by Oxford University Press, made ready use of pictorial illustration, and the practice of including selected pictorial illustrations continues to be popular in standard dictionaries. Although space in a printed dictionary is severely limited, and no single picture can adequately illustrate the name of a thing, lexicographical inquiry conducted online can now generate a more informative array of images that together can better illustrate the meaning of a word.

This Chapter will examine whether the Digital Content Directive (DCD) can sufficiently protect the consumer who concludes contracts through software on AI-driven online platforms (without being directly involved in the contractual process) against certain of the existing risks. More specifically, due to a technical error or some other factor, such contracts may be mistaken or unintended by the human consumer. Moreover, the consumer may end up dealing with an unreliable, fraudulent or even fictitious trader suffering loss as a result. The question arises as to whether the consumer will have a sufficient remedy in these cases, namely an available route to compensation. In this respect, the Digital Content Directive merits examination with the aim of ascertaining whether it responds to this need of the consumers who contract on AI-driven platforms. The main questions in this context will be whether such platforms qualify as ‘digital services’ within the meaning of said Directive and if yes, whether the provisions of the measure are suitably adjusted to the need of the substituted consumer for an available route to compensation in these cases. These questions may also pinpoint to a possible approach towards the liability of marketplaces for the non-conformity of goods and services offered by third party sellers through their systems. As it will be shown, though the DCD does contain tools that could prove useful to consumers in their attempt to claim and receive compensation, its application is not without problems that may prevent this result. Other measures, specifically the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) may offer some help, where the DCD could not do much.

Compilations of quotations and of proverbs have a long history, with some significant differences. Dictionaries of quotations as we know them today are a more recent phenomenon, and belong in the area of popular reference. The full range of dictionaries of proverbs encompasses a scholarly approach to language analysis, as well as more popular productions. This chapter, focusing on collections available today, looks at what the form of such publications can tell us about the primary value of such a resource to readers, as well as what publishers and website originators believe readers want.

AI-enhanced smart contracts exhibit a high degree of autonomy in their ability to create and execute transactions between and among humans and machines. AI should allow a broader use of of marts contracts in consumer transactions by allowing businesses to satisfy consumer protection law through the coding of smart contracts. AI should be used to advance the principles of fairness and economic efficiency in the drafting and enforcement of smart consumer contracts.

Society needs to influence and mould our expectations so AI is used for the collective good. we should be reluctant to throw away hard (and recently) won consumer rights and values on the altar of technological developments.

The chapter gives a brief history of thesauri and an overview of types of thesauri and the various ways they can be used to retrieve and discover synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, and other types of related word. A case study of The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary explores the ways that a historical thesaurus (with its associated historical dictionary) can be used to analyse linguistic and social change. Throughout the chapter it is argued that thesauri and dictionaries are most effective when regarded as complementary and interconnected language resources, an integration which is being facilitated by the digital age.

The application of AI in judicial decision-making has the potential for both courts and people seeking justice in consumer law contexts. This is especially true for AI assistant systems that help judges by pre-evaluating individual cases. Currently, the application of a human-out-of-the-loop robojudge is unrealistic in Europe as its use would not only be in conflict of fundamental rights enshrined in the ECHR

“The dictionary” – the idiom is so thoroughly established that we could not avoid using it in the title of this book, the Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary, even though the book’s purpose is to undermine the restrictive force of that the. The dictionary identifies a genre, type, or medium, like the novel, the symphony, or the movies, but there is a difference: we say, when someone has a question about a word, “Look it up in the dictionary!” yet no one with a question about moral character says, “Look it up in the novel!” or, about orchestration, “Look it up in the symphony!” In fact, there are many types of dictionary, many different dictionary examples of each type, and for practical purposes an inexhaustible number of dictionaries to consult on almost any question about any word. “The dictionary” is reductive. This handbook is correspondingly and correctively expansive in its understanding of dictionaries.