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There are two competing approaches to the change of lexical meaning: the individualizing approach, which focuses on the emergence of each particular meaning in a vocable, and the holistic one, which aims to account for the fluctuations, i.e. the expansion, stabilization and contraction of the range of its meanings. The individualizing approach remains dominant until today, although Arsène Darmesteter paved the way for the holistic approach as early as 1887. The purpose of this article is to extract part of the content of the TLF(i)’s historical records in order to build a diachronic semasiological database that can be converted into a series of trees symbolizing the fluctuations of the polysemy of an item century by century. The study is illustrated by exploring the evolutionary polysemy of the verb prévenir and the nouns terre and monde and results in highlighting the period of “coincidence” between the respective polysemies of these two nouns.
