From a general point of view, it gives you the means to define the logics of your own text. That is, it gives you some guidelines for identifying what kind of structural object (e.g. division in a text, paragraph, sentences) or specific phenomena (identification of names and places, precise bibliographical references, metrical structure of a poem) you actual want to identify and markup. It also gives a strong background to document your work along various dimensions like the identification of the source document (where you found your source manuscript), the actual participants in the dialogue you are transcribing, or the tracing of the various versions of your encoding work. But more precisely, the TEI offers a comprehensive background for actually making your own choices concrete from a technical point of view. If you happen to discover that you want to integrate dictionary entries in your otherwise prose document you can actually add to your document model the module named “Dictionaries”.