@mister kitten,
Isn't having trouble with a definition the same with words in English or Italian, and isn't the solution the same in both cases?
We come across a word we don't know, perhaps we read it for the first time, perhaps we only have a very vague knowledge of its meaning (from guessing when we have seen it before) but it now becomes
important to know more about its meaning (s).
Initially, we learn words in a foreign language by making a table of words on the right and its equivalent on the left, always remembering that on
both sides the words are not
precisely the same but similar, and that both have
all sorts of shades of meaning depending on the context.