Terminology: an Introduction There has been a lot of terminology talk in here, which makes sense considering that we are the European Parliament’s Terminology Coordination Unit. But for all of you who are yet to discover what terminology is all about, we have prepared a short introduction into this comprehensive discipline. Words are used in everyday language. They are not specific, they have synonyms and they belong to the common language (e.g. house, dog, school, pen). While terms are used in specialized languages (in this case, by “language” we do not mean English, Spanish, French, Chinese, but the language of medicine, politics, chemistry, law, maths, physics, engineering, linguistics, etc.), they have a single meaning which is described by a single and precise definition; they belong to the specialized languages. There are a lot of specialized languages because there are lots of domains of specialization. Basically, terms are “specialized words”. Terms mainly derive from Latin and ancient Greek, but they can also be invented when a language does not have a term to express a concept yet. In this case, they are called “new terms”, which in linguistics turns to be neologism. Since in the last decades we have been facing unprecedented situations and several scientific discoveries, neologisms are quite common (e.g. computer, social network, covidiot, data protection). Terms are strictly connected to concepts because each concept, in a specialized language, should be expressed by a term. If more than one term can express the same concept or if the same concept can be expressed by more than one term, then we do not have terms, but words. Uniqueness (concept > term) is at the core of terminology. In terminology, it is important to define the domain, which is the area of knowledge we are talking about. For example, profiling can have three different meanings, depending on the domain. It can describe a technique to identify criminals used in criminology, or a comparison between consumers in economics, or a specific operation in the mechanic sector. In order to avoid ambiguities, it is fundamental to specify to which domain the term belongs to. Since terms are special words, and these words are in texts, they can be found in texts and retrieved from them through a process called terminology extraction. In the past, this process was carried out manually, but now we have software that can do part of the job automatically because it relies on algorithm recognition. We usually need to find a lot of terms, so we need to verify a lot of texts. Thus we can collect several texts about a specific topic and extract the terminology. In this case, we extract terms from a corpora of texts (corpus in the singular form). Once we have the terms, we can organize them according to their function and meaning and we can map the relations between the concepts, as we did in the Covid-19 event. Terminology is useful to make the language clear, to enable people to express their thoughts clearly and to communicate efficiently. A clear communication avoids misunderstandings and, in the worst cases, frauds, tricks, and circumventions. Written by Elisa Callegari. Translator and linguist, she has a great interest in terminology and formation of neologisms.