This paper documents research toward building a complete lexicon containing all the words found in general newspaper text. It is intended to provide the reader with an understanding of the inherent limitations of existing vocabulary collection methods and the need for greater attention to multi-word phrases as the building blocks of text. Additionally, while traditional reference books define many proper nouns, they appear to be very limited in their coverage of the new proper nouns appearing daily in newspapers. Proper nouns appear to require a grammar and lexicon of components much the way general parsing of text requires syntactic rules and a lexicon of common nouns.

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The definition texts of a machine-readable pocket dictionary were analyzed to determine the disambiguated word sense of the kernel terms of each word sense being defined. The resultant sets of word pairs of defined and defining words were then computationally connected into two taxonomic semilattices ("tangled hierarchies") representing some 24,000 noun nodes and 11,000 verb nodes. The study of the nature of the "topmost" nodes in these hierarchies, and the structure of the trees reveal information about the nature of the dictionary's organization of the language, the concept of semantic primitives and other aspects of lexical semantics. The data proves that the dictionary offers a fundamentally consistent description of word meaning and may provide the basis for future research and applications in computational linguistic systems.