Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Semasiology "signification, meaning" (semaino) "indicate, signify") is a discipline within linguistics concerned with the question "what does the word X mean?". It studies the meaning of words regardless of their phonetic expression. Semasiology departs from a word or lexical expression and asks for its meaning, its different senses, i.e. polysemy. The opposite approach is known as onomasiology. The term was first used by Christian Karl Reisig in 1825 in his Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft (E. Lectures on Latin Linguistics).