The ECD is a production dictionary — that is, it aims to provide all the information needed for a foreign learner or automaton to produce perfectly formed utterances of the language.
Since the lexemes and phrasemes of a natural language number in the hundreds of thousands, a complete ECD, in paper form, would occupy the space of a large encyclopaedia.
Such a work has yet to be achieved; while ECDs of Russian and French have been published, each describes less than one percent of the vocabulary of the respective languages.
The English vocable improve, for example, includes six Lexical Units, each of which is provided a separate lexical entry: IMPROVE, verb The lexicographic numbers (given in bold after the entry word) reflect degrees or levels of semantic distance between Lexical Units within a vocable: Roman numerals mark the highest-level semantic groupings, while Arabic numerals mark the next highest level, and letters indicate the lowest level distances.
The subscript and superscript numbers attached to words in the definition refer to subsenses (subscripts) and homophonous entries (superscripts) for a word as given in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English[23] —thus, “device11” refers to the first entry for device in this dictionary, first subsense.