Lacan's shorthand for that wider world was the Other—"the big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words ... are public, communal property." But though it is an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in the Imaginary and the Real. The symbolic dimension of language is that of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.