General-lexical within Encyclopaedic

Abstract

Up to the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, in linguistics, and outside it, two terms of different age were used promiscue, i.e. so as to mean the same thing or at least that the use of one completely included the other, and vice versa. The terms in question are lexicography and lexicology. The first one is much older since it is connected to the Greek form leksikográphos which was used as early as 4th century B.C., while lexicology appeared much later as an analogue derivative with a range of so-called internationalisms used to name scientific disciplines (archaeology, biology, philology, malacology, musicology, pedagogy, psychology, zoology), made using the suffix -logìa (similar to Croatian suffixes -slovlje, which is the more common one, and -znanstvo). Differentiating between lexicology and lexicography started in the 1950s when lexicology started to emerge as an independent linguistic discipline.