16 Eckhard J. Schnabel or divided into ‘basic’ (or ‘literal’) and the more metaphorical senses. It is the lexicographer who decides whether and when usage information (register, currency, style, pragmatics, status, field)41 determines the con- struction of hierarchical entries. In view of the first characteristic of a good lexicographical definition described in the previous paragraph, a minimum of lexical units is preferable to a large number of sense units. 2. The meanings of βάπτειν and βαπτίζειν As regards the meaning and use of βαπτίζειν (and βάπτειν), the evidence will show that we find 1. physical uses and 2. figurative uses.42 As regards the physical (or literal) meaning, there are several extended meanings, understood as senses which are “different from, and later than, its original and central sense”.43 The basic, i.e. most frequent meaning of the action verbs βάπτειν and βαπτίζειν is best defined broadly as ″to put into a yielding substance⁇ such as a liquid (e.g. water or dyes) or the body of an animal; glosses for translation into English are ‘to plunge, to dip, to immerse’.44 Sometimes the context indicates that the Greek term focuses on the result of the action of immersion, warranting different transla- tions in English: when a person immerses himself in water, he ‘washes’ himself; if she stays under water, she ‘drowns’; if a ship is immersed in the ocean, it ‘sinks’; when woven cloth is immersed in water containing color pigments, it is ‘dyed’; when a knife is ‘plunged’ into the flesh of an animal, it is ‘slaughtered’. These are extended meanings45 which focus 41 Atkins, ″Theoretical Lexicography⁇, p. 46. 42 Joseph Ysebaert, Greek Baptismal Terminology: Its Origins and Early Development (Graecitas Christianorum Primaeva; Nijmegen: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1962), pp. 12-40, makes the same basic distinction. 43 Robert L. Trask, The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics (Edin- burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 116; as an example, he points to the central sense of ‘head’ as ‘top part of the body’ and the extended senses of ‘top part’ (of a list), ‘director’ (head of a corporation), and ‘round thing’ (a head of cabbage). When the extended sense has no semantic features in common with the original or central sense, we speak of a transferred sense; ibid. pp. 116, 347. Whether extended senses are always later than the ‘original’ or central sense is disputed. As regards the following discussion, see John Chadwick, Lexicographica Graeca: Contributions to the Lexicography of Ancient Greek (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 59-62, for βάπτειν. 44 The detailed study of Ysebaert, Greek Baptismal Terminology, suffers from the as- sumption that in the ‘general language’ the verb βαπτίζειν means ‘to immerse’ always with the connotation of a perishing (ibid. pp. 13-14, 40, 42), a theory that is clearly disproved by the Greek texts in which βαπτίζειν occurs. The connotation of ‘perishing’ is only one of several extended senses of the term.