Lexical data resources are growing rapidely thanks to the Internet. Unfortunately, despite numerous existing standards like TEI, MARTIF, GENELEX, EAGLES/PAROLE, etc. each resource has its own format and own structure. Furthermore, the existing lexical data is generally developed for a specific purpose and can't be reused easily in other applications. In this paper, we intend to define a complete framework for developing multilingual lexical database for multipurpose. The framework is generic enough in order to accept a wide range of dictionary structures and proposes for manipulating heterogeneous dictionaries a set of common pointers into these structures. We will first present the organisation of Dictionary Markup Language (DML) framework. Then we will describe more precisely the DML language based on XML schemata. Next, we explain how to describe dictionary macro and microstructures with the DML. Lastly, we will explain our concept of common pointers defined in a Common Dictionary Markup (CDM) set.