One of the most persistent and practically consequential problems in lexicographic theory is the absence of a universally accepted procedure for separating homonymy from polysemy. The problem becomes especially visible in the compilation of homonym dictionaries, where every headword entry implicitly embodies a classificatory decision: treating two meanings as independent homonyms rather than as related senses of a single polysemous word reshapes the entire macrostructure of the dictionary and affects how the resource is used by translators, language learners, and computational systems alike. Despite decades of scholarly attention, lexicographers continue to rely on heterogeneous and often incompatible criteria—etymological, semantic, distributional, and morphological—and the resulting dictionaries routinely contradict one another on borderline cases. The aim of this study is to investigate the nature and scope of these inconsistencies by conducting a systematic comparative analysis of four influential homonym dictionaries of Russian and English, to identify the theoretical sources of disagreement, and to develop an integrated diagnostic procedure that combines multiple criteria into a transparent, reproducible decision-making protocol. A corpus of 150 contested lexical pairs was extracted from the four dictionaries and subjected to a five-parameter evaluation that included etymological tracing, synchronic semantic distance measurement through componential analysis, derivational paradigm comparison, collocational profiling based on the Russian National Corpus and the British National Corpus, and syntactic frame analysis. The results showed that 46.7 percent of all contested pairs received inconsistent treatment across dictionaries, and that the inconsistencies were overwhelmingly attributable to the isolated application of a single criterion rather than a balanced consideration of multiple types of evidence. When the proposed integrated procedure was applied, classification accuracy—measured against a gold standard established by expert consensus—reached 91.3 percent, and inter-annotator agreement among three independent lexicographers rose from a Cohen's kappa of 0.52 to 0.84. These findings demonstrate that a principled multi-criteria approach can substantially reduce the subjectivity that currently undermines the reliability of homonym dictionaries, and they point toward a more transparent and empirically grounded lexicographic practice.

Homonymy, polysemy, lexicographic classification

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