Raoul Auger Feuillet coined the word ‘chorégraphie’ in 1700 in the title of his seminal publication on dance notation, Chorégraphie, ou l'Art d'Écrire la Danse, par Caractères, Figures et Signes Démonstratifs. It was nevertheless a hesitant neologism, since the word does not appear in the body of the text, nor in the ‘privilège du roy’. Neither did his many translators find a direct equivalent in their respective languages. John Weaver, for example, opted for ‘orchesography’, Thoinot d'Arbeau's sixteenth-century French word, which itself was perhaps inspired by Lucian's well-known dialogue Peri Orcheseos, ‘Of Dance’. ‘Chorégraphie’ is nevertheless a word which has since proved durable by its very adaptability. Not only do we still use it today in many languages, albeit with a slightly different meaning, but it has spawned a cluster of related terms which seek lexical legitimacy by association with what has come to be regarded as the root word. Even when Serge Lifar sought to bury what he regarded as the menial connotations of ‘choreographer’ by inventing a new word, ‘choréauteur’, devoid of any residual sense of ‘notator’, the lexical root is still evident in his alternative. So it was, also, when Rudolf von Laban went far beyond anything Feuillet could have imagined and christened his wide-ranging study of mind, body, and spirit through dance ‘Choreutik’. Readers of this book may be ‘choreologists’ of one kind or another, and if they are choreologists of the Rudolf Benesh kind, then they will deal in ‘choremes’ or minimal units of movement. Although the underlying inspiration for these and other dance-related words is the Greek, of course, they would arguably neither have been coined nor achieved a certain currency without Feuillet's original neologism. What is remarkable, therefore, is the way the word has lent itself to morphological variation, and the way each variation is testimony to specific contemporary concerns in dance.