When something is in focus light falls on it from different angles. The lexicon can be viewed from different sides. Six views are represented in this volume a cognitivist view of vagueness and lexicalization a psycholinguistic view of lexical access in speech production a patholinguistic view of lexical organization in schizophrenics and three analyses from different points of view in computational linguistics which deal with problems of the syntaxsemantics interface compositionality and systematic polysemy. A metalinguistic initial contribution outlines the historical development of lexical semantics with its complementary competing and converging strands. The introduction completes this integration of the different facets of research into a wider picture of lexicology.