This book provides an introduction to the study of words, their main properties and how we use them to create meaning. It offers a detailed description of the organizational principles of the lexicon, and of the categories used to classify various lexical phenomena, including polysemy, meaning variation, behavior in composition, and the interface with pragmatics. Elisabetta Jezek uses empirical data from digitalized corpora and speakers' judgments, combined with the formalisms developed in the field of general and theoretical linguistics, to propose representations for each of these phenomena. The book's clear structure and accessible approach make it an ideal textbook for all students of linguistics and a valuable resource for scholars and students of language in the fields of cognitive science and philosophy.