E-lexicography: development, perspectives, and the Croatian context

In this paper, we present an overview of the development of e-lexicography. First, we describe the impact of the two revolutions that contributed to it: the corpus revolution and the digital revolution. We will see how they made it possible to move from the printed dictionary to the e-dictionary, and how these two terms became synonyms. We will then consider two different approaches, that is, the two prevailing currents in present-day e-lexicography — the theoretical and the practical. We will see what the features of e-dictionaries are in relation to printed ones, and what dangers arise from the greater freedom (more space) in compiling dictionaries. We will also briefly outline the perspectives on the future development of lexicography that are mentioned in the literature, and finally examine the current state of Croatian e-lexicography, with reference to what is so far the greatest advance in Croatian monolingual general e-lexicography: the Mrežnik project. We conclude that Croatian e-lexicography keeps pace quite well with the standards of contemporary e-lexicography.