In this paper, the author argues that the view of terms as intralingually-interchangeable labels – in which context plays little or no role – can be a misleading one. From her analysis of two parallel extracts from an automotive handbook in English and German, she shows how terms at the textual level enter into many complex relations as word forms which cannot be related in any straightforward way to the kind of abstract representation often found at the system level of dictionary representation where terms are lexemes, not word forms. Such representations typically represent relations in hierarchical patterns such as ‘X is a part of Y’ or ‘X is a kind of Y’. In contrast, Rogers goes on to show that terms in text are not necessarily constrained to one type of relation or dimension, but may exhibit multidimensionality.