Semasiology (from — indicate, signify) is 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, for example polysemy. The opposite approach is known as onomasiology. The term was first used by Christian Carl Reissig in 1825 in his Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaf… (More on Semasiology)