Abstract：From the emergence of electronic dictionaries in the 1980s to the proposal of media-converged dictionaries by the China Association for Lexicography in 2019, the lexicographical community has recognized that the evolution of dictionaries from “multimedia” to “media-converged” is not an increase in the number of “media”, but involves issues such as the converging mechanism between media and modalities, and among various modalities. The media convergence (forms) should promote the modality (content), and the convergence of lexicographical definition and annotation is the core of media-converged dictionaries. Modality is the mental image of the referent of a defined word projected in people’s minds through the cognitive sensory, and it is in the multimodal contexts that lexical meaning can be easily understood. Media-converged dictionaries should integrate relevant medium, media, and modalities according to the requirement of lexical definition, so that they can jointly participate in the process of semantic representation and become important defining elements. The paper aims at clarifying the core implications, converging elements and paths, multimodal elements, and theoretical basis of media-converged dictionaries, whose textual features can be summarized as polarization, datafication, multimodalization, platformization, and networkization. The paper also examines how the multimedia features of existing digital dictionaries are achieved and their actual status from three perspectives: the production resources, knowledge texts, and digital technologies for making media converged and multimodal dictionaries.
