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Abstract

Dictionaries on trial. Use of lexicographic works in court judgements
 The paper discusses the issue of the use of lexicographic works in the process of linguistic interpretation, which causes multiple problems in the judicial practice. Omitting positive examples, we show judgements in which the decision can be considered argumentatively unsatisfactory in the area of linguistic interpretation. We hope that the presented material will help linguists and authors of Polish dictionaries better understand how their work is utilized by other users of Polish. Simultaneously, we indicate moments where judicial errors result not only from lack of knowledge or negligence on the part of the interpreters, but also from defects and inconsistencies in the results of linguistic work (e.g. from inadequate definitions or insufficient contrast between definitions of related lexemes), and insufficient familiarization of the extra-linguistic milieu with methodologically newer dictionaries and language corpora.