Eduard Wöfflin's main interest was what he termed the life history of a
word (Lebensgeschichte eines Wortes). According to his formulation
it should be the task of scholarly lexicography to present the history of a
word, its struggle with competing words, the change of its meaning, the
stages of its decline or advancement. He was not afraid to relate
philology, focussed on this goal, explicitly to the sphere of the natural
sciences, especially biology. And it was consistent with this conception
of the discipline that he always termed the skill of observation the
cardinal virtue of lexicographers. The quality of a dictionary was
determined not by the number of instances, but by the accuracy and variety
of observations. Not only should the first occurrence of a word and its
various meanings be recorded, but also its eventual disappearance; its
absence among some authors as well as its peculiar frequency among others.
To this task belong a detailed outline and analysis of syntactical
phenomena, as well as a thorough presentation of metaphorical usage and
stylistic details; also, orthography, prosody and morphology should not be
slighted.