The traditional treatment of the adverb has posed problems of classification in the three languages under consideration. English very has traditionally been classified as an adverb, and the efforts of structural linguists to reclassify it as an intensifier may be extended to French très and Spanish muy as well. However, the three intensifiers do not pattern in the same way, for very patterns with adjectives and adverbs, but not with verbs or nouns; très and muy pattern with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and with the past participle of verbs. The patterning of très and muy with nouns raises the question of the basis for differentiating adjectives from nouns. While the distinction between these two form classes in English is sometimes arbitrary, the line separating them is even less clear-cut in French and Spanish, languages in which nominalization is more widespread than in English. The unsatisfactory treatment of the three intensifiers in bilingual dictionaries of the French- English and Spanish-English type is due to the failure of lexicographers to link illustrative phrases and sentences to relevant structural features of the languages concerned, a practice all too common in dictionaries not compiled in accordance with scientific principles of lexicography.