It is a truism that meaning depends on context. Corpus evidence now shows us that normal contexts can be summarised and indeed quantified, while the creative exploitations of normal contexts by ordinary language users far exceed anything dreamed up in speculative linguistic theory. Human linguistic behaviour is indeed rule-governed, but in recent years, corpus analysis (e.g. Hanks 2013) has shown that there is not just a single monolithic system of rules: instead, language use is governed by two interlinked systems: one set of rules governing normal, idiomatic uses of words and another set of rules governing how we exploit those norms creatively. Types of creative exploitation include (among others): • using anomalous arguments to make novel meanings • ellipsis for verbal economy in discourse • metaphors, metonymy, and other figurative uses for stylistic effect and other purposes Traditional dictionaries do a good job of listing the many possible meanings of words. But they do a poor job of reporting phraseology and an even worse job of associating different meanings with phraseological patterns. Moreover, all too often, they list a creative use that happens to have been noticed by a lexicographer as if it were a conventional norm, with resultant confusion, for example: • A riddle does not mean a hole made by a bullet (but OED says it does). • To newspaper does not mean to work as a journalist (but Merriam Webster says it does). The idiom principle formulated by the late John Sinclair (1991, 1998) argues that many meanings depend for their realization on the presence of more than one word. The Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV;