Introducing English Linguistics

1 a 
(1) : an opening in a wall of a building or a side of a vehicle to admit
light usually through a transparent or translucent material (as glass),
usually to permit vision through the wall or side, and often to admit air.
However, this basic definition is followed by a discussion of different types
of windows: windows through which transactions at banks are conducted
or tickets are sold, or which enable people to view items on display for sale
in a store.
Dictionary definitions are based on headwords. Headwords consist typ-
ically of the base of a particular word. Thus, a dictionary will define the
word cup but not its plural form cups. Likewise, the verb run will be defined
but not ran or running. However, dictionaries will often contain entries for
words with affixes having a different meaning from the base forms from
English words: Structure and meaning
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which they are derived. For instance, the OED contains a definition of the
noun help as well as two forms with related but slightly different mean-
ings that are derived from help: helpful and unhelpful. Recent dictionaries
have challenged the notion that definitions should be based on only sin-
gle headwords. Under the direction of John Sinclair, the first edition of
the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary began the practice of paying
attention to collocations in definitions: multi-word combinations that fre-
quently co-occur and have a systematic meaning. Moon (2007: 168) notes
that corpus-based work done on the Collins Cobuild Dictionary revealed that
“semantically independent meanings of take such as ‘remove, move, steal,
escort’ are less common than its use in structures such as take a step, take