Natural language processing will grow into a vital industrial technology in the next five to 10 years. But this growth depends on the development of large linguistic databases that capture natural language phenomena [1, 2]. Another important theme for future work is development of large knowledge bases that are shared widely by different groups. One promising approach to such knowledge bases draws on natural language processing and linguistic knowledge. This article describes the EDR Electronic Dictionary [3], which seeks to provide a foundation for linguistic databases, and explains the relation of electronic dictionaries to very large knowledge bases.