Shaping architectural nomenclatures through contrasting ideologies

Abstract This article analyses a debate published in the journal The Builder in 1851, in which subject field experts discussed nomenclatures for English medieval architecture. The debate illustrates how the principles of multidimensionality and terminologisation are instantiated in term formation, and describes the role played by the subjective motivations of experts in this process. Among these motivations were the authors’ personal aspirations to be recognised within their scientific community, the economic interests of publishers, and the authors’ idiosyncratic positions against possible updates to traditional terms. On a methodological level, the article highlights the importance of studying term formation as an evolving process in a diachronic perspective, focusing not just on terms as final products, as traditionally done in terminology theory, but on the dynamics which shaped them. Among the factors involved in this process, this study places particular emphasis on human agency, which played a decisive role in shaping its outcomes.