This is a text-based study of fixed expressions, or idioms. Moon's central argument is that fixed expressions can only be fully understood if they are considered in the context of the texts in which they occur. She examines several thousand fixed expressions and how they are being used in current English. She argues that examination of the corpus raises questions about many received ideas on fixed expressions and idioms, and suggests that new, use-centered, models are required.

Medical practitioners of the sixteenth century had their own body of special terms, just like the doctors of this century. McConchie here examines medical terminology used in a selection of thirteen medical works published between 1530 and 1612, and compares it with the treatment of these words in the OED and other dictionaries of today. His study reveals errors, omissions, and biases that raise important questions for lexicographical tools in general.

Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between central and peripheral sense of words. Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change.

When Henry VIII charged John Palsgrave with teaching his sister French, there were no dictionaries or grammars of either French or English. In Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, a vast work of over 1000 pages, this brilliant priest and linguist, with a dramatist's eye for contemporary life and an ear for colloquial idiom, provided the first bilingual dictionary and contrastive grammar of the two languages. Stein presents a detailed study of his achievement.