Wrestling with Words and Meanings honours the life and career of Professor Allan, commemorating at the same time the occasion of his 70th birthday. It brings together top-level researchers in linguistics – colleagues, collaborators and former students, who have all been inspired by Allan’s work in some way. These appropriately eclectic contributions are organized into the three main themes that run through Allan’s multifaceted and multifarious research: word meaning; pragmatics and discourse; and semantic theory and philosophy of language. The volume offers glimpses into corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics, as well as the more traditional descriptive, diachronic and typological perspectives. It is an outstanding collection in honour of an outstanding researcher.