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Description
In terminology planning and terminology work more broadly, the creation and establishment of new terms within specialized domains may appear to be a well-governed practice, guided by widely accepted terminology standards and established procedures across many languages. However, rapid technological development and globalized communication increasingly challenge this model. The continuous creation of English terms, particularly in fast-moving domains, leads to their swift diffusion into other languages, often without adaptation. When adaptation does occur, it frequently follows English morphological patterns and preserves the original, often metaphorical motivation.
These developments raise important questions regarding the identification of emerging terms in texts and other communicative settings, e.g., through corpus-based and AI-assisted term extraction. Criteria for identifying terminological neologisms therefore differ substantially from those applied in lexicography. Whereas lexicographic practice typically relies on frequency as a key indicator distinguishing neologism from individual lexical creativity, in terminology the emergence of a new concept within a specialized field justifies in itself the documentation of a new term, even if its textual frequency remains limited. Consequently, the detection of new terms must combine textual evidence with conceptual and domain-specific validation.
This paper examines current European guidelines and institutional practices concerning neology in terminology, as reflected in relevant research and in the work of terminology institutions. Drawing on data from the ENEOLI survey (Kallas et al., 2025), literature describing national approaches (e.g., Vaus & Janson, 2025; Zanola & Resi, 2025), the recommendations developed within the framework of ISO/TC 37/SC 3, as well as on selected national and institutional materials related to terminology planning (e.g., Prys & Jones, 2007), the study analyses how emerging concepts and their term variants are identified, evaluated, and formalized. Two main research questions are addressed: which criteria are used to determine if a candidate neoterm should be documented in a terminological resource, and what methodological guidelines can be proposed for the detection, description, validation and eventually standardization of neoterms?
The analysis of the responses collected in the ENEOLI survey shows that terminology institutions have not yet developed dedicated policies or formal workflows specifically addressing terminological or lexical innovation. Despite the lack of formalized procedures, several workflows used for the identification and description of new terms have been described, which largely implement the already established principles of terminology work as suggested in ISO standards (ISO 704, 2022). The most frequently mentioned criteria for inclusion of terminological neologisms in terminological resources included domain specificity, conceptual relevance, the frequency of use, corpora attestations, communicative necessity, and the ability to fill lexical or semantic gaps.
In the ISO TC/37 standards, the inclusion of neoterms in terminological resources is also not described by an explicit set of inclusion criteria. Instead, the relevant criteria are distributed across standards on terminology principles, concept analysis, term formation, harmonization, structured terminological representation, and resource modelling. In a similar vein, the majority of publicly available documents on terminology planning and terminology work that are published by different terminology institutions in Europe largely implement the criteria from ISO standards.
On the basis of the materials collected and analysed, methodological guidelines for the systematic detection and description of terminological neologisms are proposed. The management of terminological neology is understood as an iterative workflow consisting of detection, description, validation, harmonization, dissemination, and revision. These phases form a cycle rather than a one-directional sequence, and they include the application of contemporary corpus-based terminology work alongside generative AI systems, as well as concept analysis and expert validation as the foundations of terminology work.