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Part of
Handbook of Terminology: Volume 3. Legal Terminology
Edited by Łucja Biel and Hendrik J. Kockaert
[Handbook of Terminology 3] 2023
► pp. 432–457

Legal lexicography and legal information tools

| Aarhus University

Legal lexicography concerns dictionaries as information tools for needs-adapted information search. The objective is to develop principles and guidelines that help lexicographers design, evaluate, make and use legal dictionaries that fulfil specific types of need of specific types of user in specific types of situation concerning law, its terms, and its language. Therefore, legal dictionaries provide help in many situations, e.g., in term management processes. Legal dictionaries deal with legal terms in both systematic and alphabetical set-up and presentation forms, are descriptive and prescriptive, and provide help to clarify terms using methodological and systematic approaches. Finally, legal dictionaries are information tools that assist users in encoding and decoding, and cater for the information needs of lawyers as well as non-lawyers.

Keywords: functional theory, comparative law, term selection, data types, information needs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Legal lexicography and its object
  • 3.The interdisciplinary nature of legal lexicography
  • 4.Users and their lexicographic needs
  • 5.Selection of terms
  • 6.Selection of other types of data
  • 7.The presentation of data
  • 8.Databases, search engines and interfaces
  • 9.Concluding remarks
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC BY-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hot.3.leg4
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