This text offers an introduction to words and corpus linguistics. From this foundation it explores the much wider issues that are inevitably raised but somehow marginalized in lexicology (the study of words) and corpus linguistics.

Part 1: what is a word?; methods in lexicology - the dictionary; methods in lexicology - the thesaurus; history of lexicology - India, China, the Islamic World, Europe; evolution of the dictionary and thesaurus in England; recent developments in lexicology; sources and resources. Part 2: etymology; prescription; grammar, syntax and lexicogrammar; semantics; language and reality; language and society; language and cognition; language and computation; language and languages; translation. Part 3: corpus linguistics as a theoretical approach; corpus typology; corpus linguistics and language; the minimal assumption postulate; research and development; corpus semantics; multilingual semantics; multilingual corpus semantics; applying multilingual corpus semantics; semantics and the multilingual corpus.