semantics

The English word semantics came in 1893 from French sémantique. Michel Bréal used the French term in the 1880s for the study of meaning in language. He built it from Greek sēmantikos, "significant" or "having meaning." Behind that Greek adjective is the verb sēmainein, "to signify" or "to show by a sign."

The deep root is the Greek noun sēma, meaning "sign" or "mark." In ancient Greek, the family of words pointed to signs, signals, tokens, and interpretation. That older sense stayed broad for centuries. The modern technical term came only when linguistics began naming its own branches more tightly.

French gave the field a formal label in the age of comparative philology. English first used semantics for the scientific study of meaning, especially word meaning and change. During the 20th century, the term spread from linguistics into philosophy, logic, and computing. It then moved again into public speech, where people began saying "that's just semantics" for disputes over wording.

That popular phrase is newer than the discipline itself and often flatter than the original idea. In serious use, semantics is not mere wordplay but the structure of meaning in signs and sentences. The word still carries Bréal's scholarly ambition from the 19th century. It asks not just what words are, but what they mean.