A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of African Languages at the University of Zululand, 2017 / Anyone whose mother tongue is isiZulu can provide or make an attempt to provide meaning of any isiZulu lexical item. What is very difficult is to define / explain isiZulu words as lexical items. There are countless reasons for such difficulty in defining / explaining isiZulu words in isiZulu. Some of these reasons are the following: (i) The sounds of isiZulu words do not hide anything in as far as meanings of words are concerned. Defining isiZulu words is like defining what has already been defined; (ii) IsiZulu words are written as they are being pronounced; (iii) It is extremely difficult to conduct research among amaZulu. AmaZulu are unable to assist with definitions of the isiZulu words because of a number of reasons like they are not trained in providing definitions of isiZulu lexical items; (iv) There are very few resources that can help someone who is conducting research on defining / explaining isiZulu words in isiZulu. The above mentioned reasons are just the few of the reasons which hinder research on defining /explaining isiZulu lexical items in isiZulu. The main objective of this research is to provide assistance to those who intend embarking on research in defining / explaining isiZulu lexical items most especially in a monolingual approach. Another objective of this research is to assist those who intend doing lexicography by providing lexicographic tools which will solve some problems encountered in the field of lexicography.