The term "machine-readable dictionary" can clearly be taken in two ways. In its stronger and better established interpretation, it presumably refers to dictionaries intended for machine consumption and use as in a language processing system of some sort. In a somewhat weaker sense, it has to do with dictionaries intended for human consumption, but through the intermediary of a machine. Ideally, of course, the two enterprises would be conflated, material from a single basic store of lexical information being furnished to different clients in different forms. .
