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There used to be a time when an expert could still easily distinguish a spelling dictionary from a frequency dictionary, a collocation dictionary from a valency dictionary, and a thesaurus from an illustrated dictionary. Rightly enough differentiating between a dictionary, a corpus, an atlas, and a frequency list would have posed not the slightest difficulty. The combination of lexicography and the Internet have made these tasks more difficult: Internet dictionaries are able to bring together many different types of information in new ways and present them in a way that adapts to the user. Networks of dictionaries, blended with corpora, multimedia extensions, and automatic language analysis tools create new types of lexical information systems and dictionary portals. In this section, we shall attempt to shine a little light in the gloom of different types of dictionaries, dictionary portals, and lexical information systems. In the process, we aim to demonstrate that the disorder brought to the classification of the animal kingdom by a “sniraffion” can be worthwhile.
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