One line of recent work on definite articles has been concerned with languages that utilize different forms for definite descriptions of different types. In the first part of this paper, I discuss the semantic analysis of the underlying distinction of weak and strong definite articles as proposed in Schwarz (2009), which formalizes the contrast in terms of uniqueness (for weak articles) vs. anaphoricity (for strong articles). I also review the empirical motivation for the analysis based on German preposition-determiner contraction and its implications for related semantic phe- nomena. The second part of the paper surveys recent advances in documenting contrasts between definites in various other languages. One issue here will be on assessing to what extent the cross-linguistic contrasts are uniform in terms of their semantics and pragmatics, and to what extent there is variation in the relevant patterns. A second issue is to evaluate how the obvious variation in the formal realization of the contrast across languages can contribute to a more refined imple- mentation of the contrast in meaning.