📚 Semantics

Books with semantics on their catalogue record, first published between 1656 and 2011, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject semantics in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 15,862 works the catalogue holds under that subject. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Book of Signs	Rudolf Koch	1923	25
	Vākyapadīya	Bhartr̥hari.	1887	22
	History in English words	Owen Barfield	1926	15
	How to do things with words	J. L. Austin	1962	15
	The message in the bottle	Walker Percy	1656	14
	Les mots français	Henri Mitterand	1963	14
	Semantics	John I. Saeed	1997	14
	Précis de sémantique française	Stephen Ullmann	1952	12
	The principles of semantics	Stephen Ullmann	1951	11
	Speech acts	John R. Searle	1969	11
	Language in thought and action	S. I. Hayakawa	1949	10
	A select glossary of English words used formerly in senses different from their present	Richard Chenevix Trench	1859	9
	Studies in words	C. S. Lewis	1960	9
	Design for thinking	Albert Upton	1961	9
	Semantic Relations and the Lexicon	M. Lynne Murphy	2003	8
	Manhood of humanity	Alfred Korzybski	1921	7
	Science and sanity	Alfred Korzybski	1933	7
	How to read a page	I. A. Richards	1942	7
	Levels of knowing and existence	Harry L. Weinberg	1959	7
	Eléments de sémiologie	Roland Barthes	1967	7
	Teoría semántica	Kurt Baldinger	1970	7
	Semantics	Janet Dean Fodor	1977	7
	Semantics	James R. Hurford	1983	7
	Introduzione alla semantica	Tullio De Mauro	1965	6
	Introduction à la sémiologie	Georges Mounin	1970	6
	Semantics	F. R. Palmer	1976	6
	Lexical Meaning	M. Lynne Murphy	2008	6
	Introducing Semantics	Nick Riemer	2010	6
	Lexical meaning in context	Nicholas Asher	2011	6
	Semantics and communication	John C. Condon	1966	5

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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