The nature of word meaning is a matter of debate. I will consider four conceptions of meaning and their consequences for the interpretation of the information in bilingual dictionaries. The first is the view that the meaning of a word is the set of objects it can refer to. This view is widely held in philosophy and logic. A second view considers meaning as the relations of a word to other words. It emerged in structuralist linguistics. A third view takes the use of a word as the basis for its meaning. This is the view that underlies corpus linguistics. Finally I will consider a cognitive view of word meaning, which assumes that the meaning of a word is realized in the knowledge a speaker has of that word. To a certain degree, aspects of these different views can be combined. In making a bilingual dictionary, it is not crucial to adopt one particular semantic theory, but the interpretation of the entries depends on the theoretical background.