The second edition contains more than 110,000 headwords and more than 10,000 encyclopaedic entries. In 1779 he published the first Tamil to English dictionary containing 9000 headwords. Both editions claim "over 220,000 headwords". The five text volumes contain approximately 60,000 headwords and senses in 5,544 pages. A few have even used diacritics to show pronunciation "without respelling" in the headwords. In addition, headwords may not accurately reflect a dictionary's size. The GSL contains 2,000 headwords divided into two sets of 1,000 words. The lemmata (headwords) come from "a range of biblical, grammatical, and patristic texts". The received edition "Zhengzitong" has over 33,000 headwords in 12 fascicles (). Note that the numbers of character headwords include variants. Headwords are traced back to their earliest usage. Headwords also have translation equivalents in various national languages.