 Natural language ontology had been suggested as a discipline first by Bach (1986), who uses the term “natural language metaphysics”. That term is in a sense more adequate than “natural language ontology”: ontology is often taken to be narrower than metaphysics, dealing just with what there is (the inventory of things) rather than, as metaphysics does, with the nature of things (Quine 1948). However, “ontology” is increasingly used in the broader sense of metaphysics as well, especially when it has an empirical or applied dimension (e.g., “applied ontology”, a field of study that involves the practical application of ontological notions and theories to specific domains, such as management, biomedicine, or geography), a usage this entry will adopt as well. Also the count noun “ontology” is better usable than “metaphysics” to denote the subject matter of a branch of metaphysics since it comes with a plural, allowing talk about “the ontologies of natural languages” and “different ontologies” being the subject matter of different branches of metaphysics.