The current state of progress of a research project for the design and development of a bilingual, Italian-English/English-Italian, lexical database system is presented. The aim is to create an integrated system in which a number of monolingual electronic dictionaries and/or lexical databases can be linked through the medium of a bilingual database. In addition, procedures are being implemented to establish access paths from the dictionary data to archives of texts in machine-readable form and language reference corpora, and vice versa. The system not only provides the standard look-up functions offered by conventional mono- and bilingual dictionaries but the organization of the data on database structures makes it possible to access and exploit the lexical information in many different and new ways. The structuring of the bilingual component is described in some detail and some of the possible applications envisaged for a tool of this type in the fields of pure and applied linguistics, lexicography and language learning are mentioned.