The ‘treasure-house’ of the Thesaurus is its archives, which today contain approximately 10 million slips encompassing the vocabulary of Latin from the earliest surviving texts down to about A. D. 600. These are arranged alphabetically according to their lemmata and, under each lemma, in chronological sequence. On many slips the context of the lemma appears in full; others, particularly where a text has been excerpted, give only a chapter or section reference or, in the case of some late authors, a reference to an index or concordance. With the slips as starting point, the task of writing an article involves establishing the semantic, syntactic and stylistic features of a word in all its occurrences.