Abstract:
The article focuses on the correlation of the use of a system of scientific classifiers in taxonomic lexicographic definitions of animal and plant names in present day dictionaries of the English language used to represent scientific biological information about animals and plants and the level of categorization a defined word belongs to. The system includes three types of classifiers: scientific terms (mammal, gastropod, etc.), taxonomy markers (genus, class, order, etc.) and Latin names (e.g. Barathra brassicae, Agrimonia eupatoria) which are used differently: basic level name definitions contain all types of scientific classifiers, definitions of genera names usually contain some of them, and definitions of names denoting life forms do not display any scientific knowledge at all. Our conclusion is that the more important the level of categorization is, the more scientific information the definition includes.
