Implications of three approaches to defining words in a dictionary are explored. The apparently most natural is the definition of meaning, or formal identification. Tending toward a unification of the diverse, this treatment, which groups paper paste with fruit paste, is maintained to be justified by the rhetoric of metaphor and metonymy. The terminological approach, arguably as venerable as definition by virtue of its debt to classical logic, and used in artificial intelligence, emphasizes not the word as such, but its capacity to name in univocal fashion the objects of discourse, without which the truth value of statements is not calculable. The componential approach, observed to be based on both Saussurean analysis and distributional grammar, is marked by a flexibility that is viewed as both its weakness and its strength. Implications for the teaching of languages are explored. (Copyright 1995, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (L. Hunter in LLBA 1995, vol. 29, n. 4)