This essay aims at providing some preliminary acquaintance with different attempts at theories of embodied cognition and language. The scope will cover all approaches that are commonly referred to in the embodiment literature and will range from accounts that are almost metaphysical to applied linguistic theory. The study starts with ‘transcendental embodiment’. This is a description of how the body found its way into the tradition of phenomenology (Husserl and Merleau-Ponty). It then moves on to the approaches more commonly referred to in embodiment literature, which take their cue from the life sciences, hence classified under ‘empirical embodiment’. Under the heading ‘perception and cognition’, the essay discusses the more philosophical answers to the question of what we should make of the idea that the mind as perception and cognition is embodied (James, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Gibson and the enactive approach). Under the heading of ‘cognition and language’, it discusses different aspects of the embodiment hypothesis currently held in cognitive linguistics, which is by far the most popular interpretation in the field. In the last section, it mentions three more ‘peripheral’ descriptive interpretations, viz. that of conversation analysis extended to the body, that of explicit referring to the body in metaphor, and finally, that of postmodernist embodiment.