The article provides a critical look at how the adverb väl with its wide definitional spectrum is presented in Swedish dictionaries. While older dictionaries treated the adverbial complement and disjunct adverbial in one and the same entry – it was thus seen as a case of polysemy – a different model of description dominates in modern monolingual dictionaries. There, the adverbial complement and disjunct adverbial are considered homographs with two distinct entries separated by pronunciation: the adverbial complement is said to be pronounced with a long vowel and the disjunct adverbial with a long consonant. The article questions this division. As the disjunct adverbial normally is not emphasized, and emphasis in Swedish to a large extent is achieved by length, it can be deduced that the long consonant in the disjunct adverbial can scarcely come into play in the actual use of the language.