[...] In the typical form of a “semantic differential” study, a subject or group of subjects is presented with a number of pairs of antonymous adjectives [...]. The scale between every pair of adjectives has seven places on it. The subject is then given a “concept,” e.g. 'knife', and is instructed to place it in one of the seven positions on each scale. [...] For a “concept” thus rated on a set of scales, there emerges a (“semantic”) profile [...]. No standard list of scales or concepts has been fixed; it is the use of such scales, drawn up for a specific problem to elicit differences between profiles, that gives the procedure the name “semantic differential.” [...] By now this term has become familiar in many circles, but it was hardly a happy choice to begin with, as one hardly thinks of a “differential” as an instrument for discovering differences. Could it have been suggested by Korzybski’s awkward “structural differential”? [...]
- Weinreich (1958), a pag.347-348

[...] the “semantic differential” measures [...] not the “meaning”, but chiefly the affect, or the “emotive influence”, of words.
- Weinreich (1958), a pag.347

BUT IS IT MEANING? At this point we are ready to consider the question of what the semantic differential really measures. The authors consider it “a psycholinguistic tool, designed…to measure the meanings…of signs” [Osgood, Charles E., Suci, George J., and Tannenbaum Percy H., 1957, ‘The Measurement of Meaning’, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, p. 275]. It measures “meaning” in a particular psychological sense, which they take pains to define.
- Weinreich (1958), a pag.358

Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum claim that “the semantic differential taps the connotative aspects of meaning more immediately than the highly diversified denotative aspects” [Osgood, Charles E., Suci, George J., and Tannenbaum Percy H., 1957, ‘The Measurement of Meaning’, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, p. 290]. [...] What the semantic differential IS equipped to measure seems to be some aspect of the affect of words, their so-called “emotive influence” [...].
- Weinreich (1958), a pag.359

This new type of “psycholinguistic” research, entitled “the semantic differential” and heralding revolutionary things for lexicography, was first unveiled in 1952 [Osgood, Charles E., 1952, "The Nature and Measurement of Meaning", 'Psychological Bulletin' XLIX, pp. 197-237].
- Weinreich (1958), a pag.347