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Over the years, psychiatry has utilized four language groupings, the languages of nosology, classifications, persons, and therapeutic techniques. The language of diagnosis is most often an amalgam of these four, but is perhaps the most haphazard linguistic artifact of the profession. Nosology is the conceptualization of disease, ranging from the philosophical to the empirical and including descriptions of clinical conditions. Classification is an exercise in taxonomy, plagued by ambiguities in what is to be classified, disorders or patients, general conditions or specific clinical entities, and further plagued by the differences seen in the alleged same disorder. The person language fails when it equates a person with his or her disorder; that is, a person is not a schizophrenic. In the language of therapy, patients tend to be described according to the interviewer's therapeutic orientation. The official hodge-podge called the language of diagnosis has many abuses and obfuscations: it is artificial in form and scope, using no verbs; it is guided by a narrow range of terms and rules for combinations of terms; it is a compound of diverse conceptions and levels of abstractions; its genetic terms are ambiguous and tend to be vulgarized through popular usage; and its greatest limitation is that the naming of disorders in terms of the standard nomenclature gives insufficient clues to treatment.