The first publications on specialized combinatorics date back to the 1980s and appeared in a context in which profound changes were affecting terminology both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews the main ideas associated with these publications and more recent ones. It attempts to show how they contributed to further our understanding of the functioning of terms, and more specifically their linguistic behavior. Ideas are grouped into three general perspectives (terminography, text-based approaches and lexicography), which allow us to highlight their main contribution to the characterization of specialized combinatorics and to the overall theoretical enrichment of terminology.