General explanations (continued)

Ordering of senses

Eight kinds of serial symbol are employed to mark the sense-divisions of an entry, and less commonly, to classify the written variants of the headword, and each is, generally speaking, identified with particular functions. At the highest level, bold capital letters (A, B, C, etc.) divide into sections an entry treating a word that is used in more than one grammatical relation. The main senses of a word are identified by bold arabic numerals (1, 2, 3). Important subdivisions of these, reflecting either semantic, grammatical, or phraseological extensions of the sense, are identified by bold small letters (a, b, c). Italic letters within parentheses (a), (b), (c), are employed either to subdivide the last level of sense-distinction still more finely, or to categorize the senses of combinations, derivatives, and phrases. Very occasionally it is necessary to subdivide a definition introduced by an italic letter, and then lower-case roman numerals in parentheses (i), (ii), (iii), are introduced.

The main sense-divisions, and any subdivisions they may have, proceed in a single sequence within the entry, or one grammatical section of it; so the appearance of B will start a new sequence 1, 2, 3 or a, b, c. But senses which have developed along several different and parallel branches are arranged into groups headed by bold capital roman numerals (I, II, III) and these do not interrupt the numerical sequence of the main sense-divisions. If a lower level of branching needs to be recognized (in the arrangement of a particularly large and complicated word, for example), an increasing series of asterisks (*, **, ***) is used. These sometimes also occur as a means of grouping the uses of phrasal verbs.

Greek letters (, , ) are used primarily to classify variant forms at the head of an entry. Sometimes the illustrative quotations are grouped according to the variant forms they illustrate, and in this case each group of quotations is introduced by the corresponding Greek letter. Certain words with an exceptionally complicated form-history are divided into sections, of which the first, headed A, illustrates the forms. This section has the usual framework, but with the numeral and lower-case roman letter sequences indicating the major and minor grammatical divisions and the Greek letters indicating the main form-variations within each of them. If the word also has more than one grammatical relation, the signification (headed B) is divided into sections, headed (the capital letter series having already been appropriated) by bold capital roman numerals, each containing separate series of main senses introduced by arabic numerals.