Lexical semantics has changed considerably in the past three decades, not least because of the emergence of Cognitive Semantics. To put those changes in the right perspective, this talk will describe the main stages in the development of word meaning research in modern linguistics: from historical semantics in the 19th century, over structuralist semantics in the middle of the 20th century, to neostructuralist and cognitive approaches in the late 20th and early 21st century. This evolution will be described from three perspectives: the theoretical one (what are the conflicting or converging assumptions of the approaches?), a descriptive one (what are the phenomena that word meaning research has focused on?), and a methodological one (is there an evolution in the methods of lexical semantics?).