Some recent dictionaries include corpus lines, links to concordances or to internet pages, or other links to dictionary-external data. Lexicographers present such external data to the user either to complement their lexicographic descriptions, or even instead of such lexicographically processed material, when the latter would be redundant to an authoritative source, or when it is simply not available. In this article, we critically review some dictionaries that offer such devices, and we make an attempt at a classifi cation of the ways in which dictionary-internal data and dictionary-external material are related. On this basis, we come up with some proposals both for future research on the topic and for future lexicographic realizations. 1