 The contribution made by historical-philological semantics to the study of word meaning had a long-lasting influence. First, with its emphasis on the principles of semantic change, historical-philological semantics was the first systematic framework to focus on the dynamic nature of word meaning, and established contextual flexibility as the primary explanandum for a theory of word meaning (Nerlich &amp; Clarke 1996, 2007). This feature of historical-philological semantics is a clear precursor of the emphasis placed on context-sensitivity by many subsequent approaches to word meaning, both in philosophy (see  Section 3)  and in linguistics (see  Section 4).  Second, the psychologistic approach to word meaning fostered by historical philological-semantics added to the agenda of linguistic research the question of how word meaning relates to cognition at large. If word meaning is essentially a psychological phenomenon, what psychological categories should be used to characterize it? What is the dividing line separating the aspects of our mental life that constitute knowledge of word meaning from those that do not? As we shall see, this question will constitute a central concern for cognitive theories of word meaning (see  Section 5).