The lexical description in modern English monolingual dictionaries (Sinclair et al., 1987;Rundell, 2002) explicitly emphasizes contextual clues, such as typical collocates and the syntactic surroundings of the given lexical item, rather than relying on very detailed definitions.
the sense definitions are obtained as syntactico-semantic abstractions of manually clustered corpus concordances in the modern corpus-based lexicography: in classical dictionaries as well as in semantic concordances.