"Peculiar to Themselves": Idioms in the Dictionary

Abstract

Some items are especially difficult to put into a dictionary, either because it is hard to decide what form of the word or phrase to enter or because it is hard to decide how to translate the chosen entry and to explain or illustrate its grammatical use. In this paper I will survey some of the problems various such expressions pose for the fieldworker constructing a bilingual dictionary of an unfamiliar target language.