Both titles use the adjective technical but in different ways. Such polysemy has deep roots and is more than a simple semantic problem. This article attempts to retrace the avatars of this adjective. Drawing on the History of Ideas, and the General History of Literature, as well as on lexicology, the article explains the ideological and sociological context which, from antiquity to the twentieth century, for the pragmatic philosophers of the seventeenth century and especially the Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, made the following equations possible : technical = scientific, technical = specialized, technical = art, and technical = technology. It shows the impact of these relations on text typology and proposes a less equivocal definition for the types of texts referred to as "technical," "scientific" or "specialized," based not on definitions of 'scientific' and 'technical' in which the concept of 'technology' is present but rather on an opposition of two concepts (the former defined as knowledge)