PAROLE-SIMPLE-CLIPS is a four-level general purpose lexicon that has been elaborated over three different projects. The kernel of the morphological and syntactic lexicons was built in the framework of the European project "Preparatory Action for Linguistic Resources Organisation for Language Engineering" (LE-PAROLE). The linguistic model and the core of the semantic lexicon were elaborated within the European project "Semantic Information for Multifunctional Plurilingual Lexica" (LE-SIMPLE). The phonological level of the description and the extension of the lexical coverage were produced in the context of the Italian project "Corpora e Lessici dell'Italiano Parlato e Scritto" (CLIPS). It comprises a total of 387,267 phonetic units, 53,044 morphological units (53,044 lemmas), 37,406 syntactic units (28,111 lemmas) and 28,346 semantic units (19,216 lemmas). It was encoded at the semantic level, in full accordance with the international standards set out in the PAROLE-SIMPLE model and based on EAGLES. Syntactic and semantic encodings were performed jointly with Thamus (Consortium for Multilingual Documentary Engineering), which is responsible for 25,000 extra entries. PAROLE-SIMPLE-CLIPS was created incrementally between the end of the 1990s and 2003.