The document summarizes the use of computer lexica in optical character recognition (OCR) and information retrieval. It discusses what a computer lexicon is, how it differs from an electronic dictionary, and examples of lexica built for Dutch texts in the IMPACT project. Lexica help improve OCR accuracy and enable more advanced searching of text corpora by accounting for spelling variants. The project achieved significant error reductions in OCR of Dutch historical texts by using tailored lexica.