Terminology is the set of terms used in a specific field (a science, an art, a trade, etc.). These are the words that are typical of a specific context .
Take the case of medical terminology . This is what the notions used in medicine are called. These terms are necessary to accurately express multiple issues inherent to the activity of doctors and other health professionals.
In medical terminology there are roots that appear frequently. Cardio , to mention one, refers to the heart . This is how terms such as cardiology , heart disease , cardiogram and heart surgeon are formed, to name a few.
The handling of certain terminologies is the responsibility of specialists. Accounting terminology , for example, is used by accountants but difficult to understand for the rest of the people. The same goes for the legal terminology that lawyers master.
The study of groups of words is also known as terminology. In this sense, it is a discipline that is responsible for the collection, description and analysis of terms in a systematic way.
Terminology, in this framework, investigates terms from linguistics and ontology . That is why it is said to be interdisciplinary, since it uses contributions from various areas to carry out its purposes.
Furthermore, the terminology is associated with philosophy . This is because it focuses on how knowledge is organized and observes how concepts are categorized.
While most Spanish speakers know this word, not everyone is aware of its etymology. First of all, we can point out that it is a hybrid neologism . A neologism is a term or expression of recent creation in a language; Sometimes it takes place due to the need to name an invention, a phenomenon or a discovery, for example. In our language , a good part of the neologisms come from others, mainly from French and English.
Adding one more fact about neologisms, it is interesting to note that this quality depends on the moment in which the word is observed and described: when a lot of time passes, decades or centuries, it stops being a word. Some examples that serve to illustrate this temporal and contextual nature of neologisms are robot, train, pen, anesthesia and UFO , which are currently simply some of the thousands of terms that are part of our language.
We said above that the word terminology is a hybrid neologism: this is because it comes from more than one language other than Spanish, and this can be seen with the naked eye: the first part is terminus , a word of Latin origin that can be defined as "terminus, border, milestone, boundary or boundary"; The second, -logy , comes from Greek and is composed of logos ("expression, word") and the suffix -ía ("quality", although over time it began to refer to concepts such as "science" or "treaty") .
Among the most common synonyms of this word are the following: lexicon, vocabulary, terms, phrases and repertoire . Although it is not part of its synonyms, we could also include the term jargon , at least because it is a similar concept. The main difference is not so obvious: while terminology is nothing more than a set of words that are associated with a particular science, subject or profession, jargon is not officially recognized but is used by people who have in mind. a trade or profession is common regardless of whether it is not defined by the dictionary of their language.