This chapter explores the relationship between word meanings as events and word meanings as potentials. It also discusses the relationship between meaning potentials and phraseology, and shows how lexical analysis of phraseology and word meaning can offer insights into word use within the Gricean theory of conversational cooperation and relevance. The chapter argues that context, rather than the word in isolation, generates a substantial part of the meaning of a word in use. It presents a detailed theoretical and practical analysis of the verb climb to illustrate the mechanics of contextual implicatures and how prototypical uses relate to prototypical meanings in context. After discussing meanings as events and meanings as beliefs in the context of H. P. Grice's theory of communicative interaction, the chapter focuses on the distinction between norms and creative exploitations of norms. It concludes by looking at preference semantics and the relationship between the numbered senses in dictionaries and prototype theory.