This section provides an overview of the senses of a large word. The great OED catalogued and defined English vocabulary with an accuracy, care, and scope that have given it a well-deserved reputation as the finest historical dictionary of any language. It might have been useful to model our entries on those of the OED, but the corpora, the degree of coverage, and the characteristics of the languages treated by the two dictionaries are different enough that there seems little advantage in this. There are various strategies for defining, and in the OED the definitions are often deeply analytical, offering species and genus definitions with qualifying clauses. Another strategy for defining is contextual glossing.
Definitions describe in some detail the extended context in which a word is used.
Such definitions are cautious since they remain close to the evidence of the citations and are descriptive rather than interpretive, but they may be misleading in suggesting a degree of precision in meaning which is far beyond the evidence. But again they are not particularly helpful to the reader looking for a translation. A third strategy for defining is by translation, treating the Old English-Modern English dictionary as a bilingual dictionary. But there are very few genuinely equivalent translations. We consider ourselves primarily to be writing a translation dictionary, although we use all three strategies discussed above for defining.