terminography

Terminography is the discipline and practice concerned with the systematic collection, description, organization, and management of terms used in specialized domains. It focuses on how terms designate concepts, how they are defined, translated, and related to each other within a domain’s knowledge structure.

Its core activities include creating term banks, glossaries, nomenclatures, and thesauri; documenting definitions, usage notes, scope notes, etymology; and establishing preferred terms and controlled variants. Terminography also addresses the semantic relationships among terms, such as broader and narrower concepts, synonyms, and related terms, as well as cross-language equivalents and mappings.

Practice often follows a terminology management lifecycle: term extraction from corpora or expert input, validation by domain specialists, formal definition writing, metadata capture, publication, and ongoing maintenance as the field evolves. Outputs may be monolingual or multilingual and are designed to support information retrieval, knowledge organization, translation, and interoperability across information systems.

Terminography intersects with lexicography, information science, translation studies, and knowledge management. It differs from general lexicography by its emphasis on standardized, repeatable term use rather than broad language descriptions. It also overlaps with ontology creation and metadata work when terms are embedded in concept schemas.

Terminographers work in academia, industry, and standards bodies, developing and maintaining controlled vocabularies for domains such as science, technology, medicine, and governance. The field increasingly uses computational methods, corpus analysis, and knowledge representation formats such as SKOS and XML, alongside traditional handcrafting of term definitions.