The article studies bilingual lexicography from a historical perspective, observing that, although the issue of meaning discrimination did not become widely recognized as an important concern in bilingual lexicography until the latter half of the twentieth century, some bilingual dictionaries took semantic features into account at a much earlier date. Based on an analysis of over 700 entries form Guy Miège's New Dictionary French and English, with Another English and French, the author identifies a number of types of direct and indirect semantic information, including definitions, contexts and field labels, and explains how they were useful to dictionary users for both decoding and encoding purposes.