Words & WritingGreek → English
Semantics
/sɪˈmæntɪks/noun
The study of meaning in language, and by extension the meaning itself.
The Greek roots
σῆμα
sêma
sign, mark
σημαντικός
sēmantikós
significant, giving signs
Literally: “concerning signs”
The story of the word
Michel Bréal named la sémantique in 1883 for the study of how word meanings drift, and English had semantics within a decade. σῆμα was a sign, and specifically a grave mound, the marker that stands in for a man; Homer uses it that way over Patroclus. The dismissal that something is just semantics turns the field inside out, since the discipline exists precisely because the gap between two near-synonyms is rarely just anything.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1890s
Same family
semaphoresemioticspolysemy
In a sentence
They agreed on every number in the report and spent an hour on the semantics of the word delay.