Vectors semantics is the standard way to represent word meaning in NLP, helping vector semantics us model many of the aspects of word meaning we saw in the previous section. The roots of the model lie in the 1950s when two big ideas converged: Osgood's 1957 idea mentioned above to use a point in three-dimensional space to represent the connotation of a word, and the proposal by linguists like Joos (1950), Harris (1954), and Firth (1957) to define the meaning of a word by its distribution in language use, meaning its neighboring words or grammatical environments. Their idea was that two words that occur in very similar distributions (whose neighboring words are similar) have similar meanings.