Abstract: Naming is one of the main issues in terminology. The question is whether
terms are created consciously, and can thus be planned, or if, on the contrary, terms
are created as a discursive act, and thus more or less unconsciously. This question
has divided the experts ever since terminology as a discipline came of age. The
distant origins of terminology are to be found in nomenclatures and taxonomies, and
the first expressions of term theory are steeped in standardizing endeavours, thus
favouring the first hypothesis. More linguistically orientated studies however,
focusing on corpora containing emerging terminologies, stress the various acts of
language which finish up by creating a new term. After a period of neglect, naming
has returned to the centre of terminologists’ preoccupations, thanks to work in
cognitive terminology, and to other detailed study on scientific articles, opening the
way to a synthesis of the two viewpoints.
