| Summary: | This paper is concerned with the conceptual variation in the use of the French verb être ‘be’. Drawing on Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces, it is shown that the internal structure of être is far from being uniform in natural language definitions. The analysis of the first definition of Internet in ten Dutch- and French-speaking non-IT Belgian magazines reveals the existence of four variants of être, themselves refined into several other sub-variants. It is demonstrated that the verb être, encoding an equivalence relation, is not the only element involved in definitions. On this conceptually empty verb at first sight, non-verbal supplements are frequently attached that conceptually enrich this relation and contribute to the conceptual structure of definitions.
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