Is the phrase the longest yard justifiable in scientific terms?
Despite the overwhelming trend towards corpus-based approaches to the compilation of general dictionaries, specialist dictionaries of terms appear recalcitrant to change, in line with the position of experts like Landau (1974), who states that the meanings of scientific terms must generally be imposed on the basis of expert advice, not extracted from usage. This paper sets out to assess whether this view is justified. Specifically, the paper considers how current scientific dictionaries of terms deal with items showing subtle semantic variations in use. Entries for five such items (aliquot; crossing over vs. crossover; dose vs. dosage; elute; express) were analysed in five well-known dictionaries of terms in molecular biology, comparing the dictionary definitions with corpus-based assessments of usage. In general, the entries provide only patchy coverage of the corpus-attested spectrum of meanings. The paper argues for an approach combining more comprehensive corpus-based description (
