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Description
This paper proposes a diachronic analysis of the use of ostensive aids in 35 print editions and the current online versions of six major English monolingual learners’ dictionaries (Oxford, Longman, Collins, Cambridge, Macmillan, Merriam‑Webster). Alongside macrostructural features of illustrations (density, types, placement, labeling), I analyze their content, performance, and consistency with respect to three questions: (1) whether principles for selecting lemmas to illustrate are stated or inferable; (2) how polysemy and semantic fields are represented; and (3) how culture‑specific concepts are handled. The findings show a persistent lack of explicit, operational selection criteria or principles (with LDOCE2 as a partial exception), a substantial reduction in the use of illustrations in the microstructure in print editions, and an unsystematic implementation of ostensive aids in online editions despite the absence of space constraints. The treatment of polysemy, prototypes, and culture‑bound items remains uneven. The present analysis is a preliminary step toward outlining a theoretically grounded methodology for the implementation of ostensive aids in the Phrase-based Active Dictionary (see Giacomini, 2025; DiMuccio-Failla, 2025).