This International Standard deals with monolingual and multilingual, general and specialized dictionaries. It specifies a formal generic structure independent of the publishing media and it proposes means of presenting entries in print and electronic dictionaries. The relationship between the formal structure and the presentation of entries used by publishers and read by users is explained in examples provided in the informative annexes.

The objective of this International Standard is to facilitate the production, merging, comparison, extraction, exchange, dissemination and retrieval of lexicographical data in dictionaries. Following a lexicographical lemma-oriented approach, it does not deal with concept-oriented works as defined in ISO 704.