Leksikografia

Leksikografija, or lexicography, is the discipline that concerns the compilation, description, and study of dictionaries. It encompasses both the practical aspects of producing dictionaries—selection of entries, sense organization, and presentation of information—and the theoretical study of how words are documented and used.

Core activities include data collection (often from corpora), sense delimitation, sense numbering, etymology, pronunciation, usage notes, cross-references, and the design of macrostructures (order of headwords) and microstructures (entry layout and features). Dictionaries may be monolingual, bilingual, or specialized; learner's dictionaries focus on language learners; encyclopedic dictionaries combine lexical entries with factual information.

History: Early glossaries and alphabetical dictionaries appeared in many languages; modern lexicography took shape with works such as Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) in English, the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Wörterbuch, and later the Oxford English Dictionary. The rise of bilingual dictionaries and, in the late 20th century, digital and corpus-based lexicography significantly transformed the field.

Contemporary lexicography often distinguishes descriptive approaches—documenting language as it is used—from prescriptive norms. It covers general and specialized lexicography, learner's dictionaries, computable lexicography, and lexicographic databases. Challenges include language variation, rapid lexical change, data quality, copyright and licensing, and balancing historical meanings with current usage.

Notable projects and resources include traditional printed dictionaries and collaborative online works such as Wiktionary; digital lexicography relies on corpora, frequency data, and semantic networks to inform entries and to support language technologies such as machine translation and natural language processing.