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Even before the use of computer-assisted techniques in lexicography and linguistics, scholars interested in language use recognized the importance of recurring patterns. Firth (1957, 195) noted that patterns in the surrounding context were important for understanding the meaning of a word, stating “you shall know a word by the company it keeps”. In looking at the social functions of language, Hymes (1968, 126) claimed that “a vast portion of verbal behavior… consists of recurrent patterns, of linguistic routines”. Branches of lexicology, too, for decades have investigated the status of multi-word units (see review in Moon 1997, 48–50). Nevertheless, lexicography continues to emphasize the individual word as the basic unit of discourse. The very fact that dictionaries are arranged by individual head words gives primacy to the individual word, and suggests that phrases and clauses of a language are built from these …