The conception of the book arose during a two-hour conversation between Ogden and Richards held on a staircase in a house next to the Cavendish Laboratories at 11 pm on Armistice Day, 1918.

[1] The original text was published in 1923 and has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics and semiotics in general.

In 2002, the critical edition prepared by W. Terrence Gordon was published as volume 3 of the 5-volume set C. K. Ogden & Linguistics (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995).

[2] Richards sets forth a contextual theory of Signs: that Words and Things are connected “through their occurrence together with things, their linkage with them in a ‘context’ that Symbols come to play that important part in our life [even] the source of all our power over the external world” (47).

Symbols are “those signs which men use to communicate one with another and as instruments of thought, occupy a peculiar place” (23).