The forthcoming Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics will soon, for the first time, provide the semiotic community with a comprehensive reference book covering, in an ecumenical manner, all the various aspects of what a significant portion of the academic population more or less agrees to call 'semiotics' However, it would be a mistake to nurture the illusion that semiotics has come of age and that this voluminous book, with its several hundred entries, will offer at last a systematic and consistant body of knowledge, as for instance a treatise of mechanics or a textbook of histology could do.