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Description
This paper presents the principles and structure of Colidioms, an online idiomatic dictionary designed to provide a fine-grained description of idioms for their full understanding and production across typologically different language families, including French, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Grounded in cognitive and corpus linguistics and in recent work in phraseology and phraseography, the tool offers a unified model for both source and target languages, describing each idiom on at least three levels: formal structure, meaning(s), and use. The methodology combines corpus-based analysis, introspection, and linguistic experiments with native and non-native speakers. The paper focuses on the microstructure of entries, namely the canonical form and combinatorial properties, corpus-based definition(s), motivation, lexical, semantic, and syntactic co-occurrence constraints, register labels, variants, semantic links to related idioms (synonyms, equivalents, conversives, antonyms, false friends, hypernyms), notions, and pedagogical examples. The resource is both source- and target-oriented and enables multidirectional search for equivalents. We argue that Colidioms serves both practical aims (decoding and encoding idioms) and theoretical ones (contributing to the description of phraseological systems in typologically different languages and clarifying the theoretical status of idioms).