system
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human
The dictionary paradox: Meaning of words in terms of other words?

Is there a subtopic in philosophy (of language) that discusses issues like, what I'm calling here, the dictionary paradox.

That if you keep looking up the meaning of words in a dictionary, you keep getting a definition consisting of other words. "In principle", if an alien could read the dictionary but not know the meaning of any word, the dictionary would be useless to it.

A related question, how come we are satisfied after a certain level of dictionary lookup, because we know the meaning of very simple words, even though we haven't checked the dictionary of those simple words, and are only aware of the "feel" of what those words mean.

In math, I know this is a problem related to formalizing a system, e.g., some algebra or analysis has to start with some axioms which are outside that system, and then the rest of the algebra or analysis is built upon it. Because of this separation of axioms and derivations, this is not that much of a problem in math. Unless we get into Godel's incompleteness (so maybe that has something to do with the dictionary paradox?).

I'm also aware of the concept of recursion (in math and CS). But even here recursion depends on some "base case" to be satisfied, otherwise it becomes infinite recursion and that's undesirable.

(BTW my philosophical level is good but not top notch. E.g., I think I'm good with the mind-body problem, physicalism, dualism, etc, etc, but I have difficulty reading/understanding Putnam and Quine. Actually I haven't read them at all. I watched some of their one-off lectures and interviews on youtube that's it.).
gpt
>A related question, how come we are satisfied after a certain level of dictionary lookup, because we know the meaning of very simple words, even though we haven't checked the dictionary of those simple words, and are only aware of the "feel" of what those words mean.

This isn't a problem because a dictionary doesn't determine the meaning of words, but rather tries to describe them. This is similar to how a physics textbook doesn't determine the laws of physics, but rather tries to describe them.