The article addresses some issues connected with the disciplinary status of lexicography. Drawing on the views of scholars such as L. Zgusta, R. Ilson, H. Wiegand, R. Gouws, H. Bergenholtz, S. Tarp, R. Lew and others, the author argues in favour of the viewpoint that lexicography is a science and that working on a dictionary is a scientific activity. The main issues tackled in the paper include understanding the complex nature of word meaning, the role of dictionaries in the description of word meaning and the development of lexical semantics. Attention is also paid to the definitional method of the study of word meaning, which is based on the analysis of dictionary definitions, components of the theory of lexicography, the relation between lexicographic theory and practice, and the teaching of lexicography as an academic discipline at universities. The author argues that the right approach to lexicography and its disciplinary status is particularly important in our era of globalisation. Only state-of-the-art lexicographic and corpus resources will secure the future of many languages, particularly lesser-used languages, and such resources will not be created until lexicography receives proper recognition as a science with "big interdisciplinary vocation" (Tarp 2017); until lexicography is turned into an academic discipline through advanced theory of lexicography, through teaching lexicography at universities, etc.

In one of his articles, an outstanding Georgian linguist Thomas Gamkrelidze discusses ecological problems from the standpoint of social sciences and humanities and introduces a very important term – ecology of culture. The present paper discusses the importance of preservation of our languages and cultures and the role of lexicography and lexicographers in this process. Issues of linguistic change, influence of a foreign tongue, defilement of a language, normativity and the normalizing function of lexicography, the role of a language in the development and preservation of national identity, as well as some other questions are addressed in the paper.

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There is a general lack of web-based tools for morphologically complex dead/old languages. Reading texts in such languages even with dictionaries is quite challenging. It is difficult to identify the lemma of a word form occurring in texts, which one could look up in a dictionary. The need for additional grammatical information about a word (classes of declension, conjugation, etc.) poses another problem. The Lexicographic Centre at Ivanè Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (TSU) has embarked on creating a fully digitalized, web-based chrestomathy of Gothic and Anglo-Saxon texts with dictionaries and grammatical paradigms integrated in it, which would facilitate the study of these linguistically important languages. Each word of the digital versions of Gothic and Anglo-Saxon texts is hyperlinked to the corresponding headword from the dictionary. The dictionary entry itself, in addition to the meaning of the word, provides via another hyperlink all necessary information concerning the morphological class and inflectional patterns of the word in question. The paper describes the structure of the Chrestomathy and its modus operandi; analyses the dictionary component of the online resource and some lexicographic solutions; discusses lexicological and technical aspects of the online resource, etc. The method applied in the Chrestomathy can be successfully used in developing similar resources for extant, morphologically complex languages characterized with the abundance of inflectional and suppletive forms, such as Hungarian, Turkish, Russian, German, Georgian and many others.