" The longer you define, the better you become at determining how close to a definition a citation falls and how far away it needs to be for it to be its own sense. Meaning is a spectrum; you are only describing the biggest data clusters on that spectrum. Madeline Novak puts it this way: “There’s a meaning there, and it could be sliced up any of a variety of ways, none of which really capture the whole thing. You’re going to be dissatisfied with it no matter what, so you’re kidding yourself if you think you’ve pinpointed it. There’s still stuff oozing around the edges. "

― Kory Stamper , Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries