A sample of the literature on acquired dyslexia is reviewed with special reference to the nature of paralexic errors. Linguistic studies of six cases of dyslexia are presented, with appropriate neurological and psychological details; there are two cases of each of three hypothesized types of impairment: visual dyslexia, 'surface' (grapheme-phoneme) dyslexia, and 'deep' (syntactico-semantic) dyslexia. Finally, a scheme for acquired dyslexia is proposed and related to the error patterns observed in 'normal' adult readers and in children learning to read; our approach to lexical look-up is one that the diagram makers may have found sympathique.