i don't know of any bulletin board that copes well with this, but this discussion about the role and nature of dictionaries is worth exploring, even though it has nothing to do with the thread title. I am not complaining about thread drift, but am just aware that anyone interested in dictionaries is unlikely to realise it is being discussed.

I see dictionaries are records of word usage, far more than definitions. If I was at home I'd look it up in something more extensive: the online dictionaries tend to be much more about current usage, in my limited experience. Not that that always works: if you are wondering what a Carnel is in the Child Ballad "The Carnel and the Crane" I can tell you that the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary gives precisely one reference: the Child Ballad.   Well, that's helpful.

I don't know, but assume France still has an authorative approach to dictionaries when a learned committee pronounces on each word and there is the 'right' meaning of the word, all others being 'wrong'. English dictionaries don't define words like that: they record a common and shifting representation of what the consensus usages of a word are. This is one reason why Lighter's easily overlooked qualification of "often earlier" meanings is important. English words frequently refer to a very wide set and then with usage this narrows down. That is what, to me, the "especially" is about: is denotes this process of moving from a wide definition to a narrower one. Eventually it changes and the narrow definition is all there is, with perhaps the older usage still there but recorded as 'Obsolete'. While we are still in the "especially" stage, both meanings are valid and current, but not equally so.