Recently, there has been more interest in lexical semantics -- that is, in the semantics of words. Lexical semantics is not so much a matter of trying to write an "ideal dictionary". (Dictionaries contain a lot of useful information, but don't really provide a theory of meaning or good representations of meanings.) Rather, lexical semantics is concerned with systematic relations in the meanings of words, and in recurring patterns among different meanings of the same word. It is no accident, for instance, that you can say ‘Sam ate a grape’ and ‘Sam ate’, the former saying what Sam ate and the latter merely saying that Sam ate something. This same pattern occurs with many verbs.