Besides providing glosses to words , the entries will sometimes provide enough context to enlarge upon or improve our understanding of the things referred to, thus contributing to our knowledge of nautical technology and related fields. The dictionary will also constitute a large resource for the study of language contact. There are few comprehensive historical dictionaries of Mediterranean nautical terminology. Jal has abstracted extensive quotations from many primary sources and has written entries that in many cases are encyclopedic. With due caution concerning the author's linguistic assumptions and conclusions, and patience with his occasional wordiness, the Glossaire Nautique is a resource of the highest value.
Much new material has, however, come to light in the last century and a half.
These new data will be included in the proposed work, and the new dictionary will be linguistically more sophisticated. The many similar and cognate forms which in Jal are scattered alphabetically through the text will, in this work, be grouped more consistently under the pertinent English headwords, facilitating the researcher's comparative studies. The present dictionary will provide more complete coverage of most of the European languages of the Mediterranean while treating the materials from a modern historical and linguistic perspective. This dictionary will be used by scholars and others, both in the U.S. and abroad, with interests in the history and languages of the Mediterranean basin. The intricate patterns of lexical exchange revealed in the proposed dictionary provide abundant material to that end.