Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which many words carry a con­ siderable weight of connotation, and to see how these aspects are dealt with in dic­ tionaries that are designed specifically for the foreign learner. Firstly, we need to decide what we mean by connotation. Iordanskaja and Mel'cuk (1984) offer a lengthy discussion of the word, so I do not propose to spend a great deal of time debating its various possible interpretations. For the purposes of this paper, I use the word connotation to refer to those associations of a word which a native speaker is aware ofbut which a non-native speaker, i.e. the learner, cannot guess at because these associations are culture-bound and cannot be con­ veyed by means of a standard dictionary definition. Nor, indeed, can these associ­ ations be deemed to be covered in a single word translation from one language to another. For example, to translate the English 'caviar' into the Russian ikra tells a Russian speaker what caviar is, but does no more. We shall return to this word later. It is often the case that connotatively weighted words appear, on the surface, to have perfectly straightforward meanings and to pose relatively few problems to the lexicographer who attempts to write conventional dictionary definitions for them. After selection of a genus word, the differentiae can be quickly assembled, woven into a definition which distinguishes the item from its co-hyponyms, and the lex­ icographer's most pressing task becomes the next word on the list. In a native speaker dictionary, one aim is to provide precise information about the boundaries of meaning, but in a learners' dictionary, the purpose of the differentiae is not so much to provide a technically or scientifically precise definition, but to provide suf­ ficient identifying features for the learner to be able to recognise the item in ques­ tion. Thus, C E D defines car as