The terminology of genres of song has aroused the interest of musicologists, medievalists, and ethnomusicologists who hope with it to achieve a better understanding of their fields. The analysis presented here of the French vocabulary connected with chanson starts from a literary genre referred to by the word chanson . A corpus of 500 dictionaries and 900 studies and essays is used to examine the word chanson and its associated word family from their beginnings in Old French up to the modern French language.