Making a dictionary is a complex task that involves many different actions simultaneously and sequentially at different levels of organization and automatization. It therefore takes a long time and typically involves more than one person. Despite the operation of several persons over a long time, the end product has to be consistent. Therefore, a set of instructions to the lexicographers is needed. Even if one person makes the whole dictionary from A to Z, he needs the instructions for himself.

The instructions codify the decisions taken in the planning phase and those made ad hoc in the research and production phase. They serve as a memorandum for the lexicographers on details that they should always handle the same way. The instructions comprise the following kinds of information:

• The principles of lemmatization.
• The principles of the selection of entries.
• The internal structure of the fields of the lexical database, in other words, the form of the values that each field can take. For instance, conventions have to be laid down as to how to represent a syntactic construction frame, and how to formulate a meaning definition.
• The kinds and form of cross-references to be inserted.
• The layout of the print dictionary.