Short’s protocol for dictionary development and utilization has been applied successfully to many underdeveloped and multidimensional organizational constructs. In this study, we utilize the Short process to further construct development of the organizational legitimacy concept. From this application, we extend Short’s approach including: an elaborated role of experts; application of dictionary development to non-English texts; utilization of multiple sources of textual data to develop the dictionaries; incorporation of inductively-derived word lists with deductively-derived word list, and a comparison across three sets of dictionaries (general, multidimensional, and context-dependent). The outcome of this paper is an elaboration of Short’s dictionary development efforts and content analysis practices.