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Since the 18th century, the principle of substitutability has been promoted and ignored in English lexicography. Definitions are often complete grammatical constituents, with functional heads like to, of, the, or a; these indirectly give grammatical-category information at the cost of page-space and substitutability. Noun definitions, then, may begin with bare nouns, as shown for a sense of ordination in (1), but often begin with an article, as in (2) and (3). The second line in each example shows the substitution of a (partial) definition for ordination in a line from Byron’s Don Juan.

             

              (1)         Arrangement of parts…. (Century, 1890)

             

                            the second [arrangement of parts] was also in three columns

             

              (2)         An arrangement or ordering (AHD5, 2011)

             

                            the second [*an arrangement] was also in three columns

             

              (3)         the condition of being ordered or arranged (OED3, 2004)

             

                            the second [*the condition of being ordered] was also in three columns

             

Definite articles trigger presuppositions: that the referent exists and that it is uniquely identifiable. Some words (such as originality) are always defined with the across dictionaries; others (including oar) are never so. But there are many that vary across dictionaries and time:

             

              (4)         (o)esophagus

             

                            the tube that leads from the pharynx… (W3; 1961)

             

                            A muscular, membranous tube…  (AHD1; 1969)

             

                            The muscular tube….(AHD5; 2011)

             

                            A muscular tube that conveys food… (mw.com; 2025)

 

             

              (5)         odo(u)r

             

                            The quality of something that is perceived by the sense of smell (AHD1, 1969)

             

                            The property of a substance that is perceptible …. (OED3, 2004)

             

                            A quality of something that is perceived by the sense of smell (AHD5, 2011)

             

                            A quality of something that stimulates the olfactory organ (mw.com, 2025)

             

              This research uses samples from 11 monolingual non-learner dictionaries to examine:

             

              - When and why are dictionary definitions ‘definite’?

              - When and why do such presuppositions make sense in the act of defining?

              - And has this changed as English lexicography has matured? Is it related to lexicographical style (lexicographese) or spatial constraints?

              - What can definiteness reveal about the communicative relationship between lexicographer and dictionary user?

              - Is ‘definite definition’ affected by the general trend of decreasing use of the more generally?

             

Regarding the last question: While the has always been the most common word in published Modern English, its use has been falling since the mid-1800s. In Google Books data, for instance, while the accounted for 5.5% of published word-tokens in 1800, by 2000 that was 3.5%. This trend could exemplify the ‘densification’, ‘informalization’, and/or ‘democratization’ of English usage (Mair 2006).  Dictionary  definitions have mostly followed the trend of reduced theover the last 250 years, their rates of the remain higher than in straight prose (from around 9% of words in Johnson’s 1755 and Webster’s 1828 dictionaries to nearly 6% in the current Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.com). Do dictionary definitions also show densification, informalization and democratization, and can we see that by looking at the?

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