This paper aiming to contribute to the panel on “Sign Systems and Sign Users in Ecological Settings” will introduce the participants of the IASS/AIS World Congress 2024 in Warsaw, devoted to “Signs and Realities,” to the main ideas of linguistic semiotics and lan-guage as a complex adaptive system. The purpose of my speech is to look at the economic term in the form of a metaphor from the point of view of cognitive semiotics - as a sign unique in its construction, combining elements of lan-guage, as a set of norms and rules; and speech, which is a source of inexhaustible possibilities for using language in all its complexity and diversity.Looking at the problem of economic terminology as well as the conceptualization of specialized concepts using a metaphorical form from the perspective of cognitive semiotics, significantly broadens the notion of a term thus making it more complex. As an element of a sign system (economic language) it means a set of criteria that it should meet in order to act as the largest carrier of information, whereas the material for a metaphor is rooted in speech and refers to the broader experiences of the sign users. Combining in such a term two opposing trends – precision and explicitness which are congruent with terminological signs from the definite sphere of science and professional practice as well as figurativeness, indefiniteness and vulnerability to interpretation which are typical for the metaphor make them a sign from the border of language and speech (langue and parole).