 The study of word meaning became a mature academic enterprise in the 19th century, with the birth of historical-philological semantics  (Section 2.2).  Yet, matters related to word meaning had been the subject of much debate in earlier times. We can distinguish three major classical approaches to word meaning: speculative etymology, rhetoric, and classical lexicography (Meier-Oeser 2011; Geeraerts 2013). We describe them briefly in  Section 2.1.