Lexicographic Practices in Europe: Results of the ELEXIS Survey on User Needs

The paper presents the results of a survey on lexicographic practices and lexicographers’ needs across Europe (and beyond) both for born-digital and retrodigitized resources. The survey was conducted during the period from 11 July to 1 October 2018 in the context of the Horizon 2020 project ELEXIS (European Lexicographic Infrastructure). The survey was completed by 159 respondents from a total of 45 countries, comprising 36 European countries and nine countries outside Europe. Looking in detail at the results of the survey, the paper focusses on determining what constitutes a job description of a modern lexicographer, including the training needed. One of more notable findings is that lexicographic training is still in most cases provided by the employer rather than obtained through formal education programmes. Furthermore, a list of various dictionary-writing systems and corpus-query systems is provided, including their features currently most often used by lexicographers. Accompanying this is information about the features lexicographer want or need in their tools. Also, the paper offers insights into current trends in lexicography and what lexicographers see as the most important emerging trends that will affect lexicography in the future. Overall, these results provide a detailed insight into what is needed in terms of tools and training and thus feed back into the ELEXIS project and will help to fine-tune resources within ELEXIS.