One of the most well-studied words of recent times.

In a pioneering 1981 Master's thesis Claudia Brugman carried out a detailed study of over showing the motivated nature of word-meaning, arguing that over could be analysed as a single category of related or polysemous senses. George Lakoff made Brugman's research famous with his 1987 case study. In particular, Lakoff argued that over could be treated as a radial category, organised with respect to a prototype, modelled in terms of a semantic network and exhibiting the phenomenon known as chaining. Lakoff argued that the distinct senses that populated the semantic network for over could be modelled in terms of image schemas, and that chaining was facilitated by extensions due to conceptual metaphor and image schema transformation s.

One consequence of Lakoff's perspective was that he adopted a highly granular approach to polysemy known as the full-specification model. Work on over by Brugman and Lakoff has inspired the research paradigm known as cognitive lexical semantics. More recently, other scholars who have worked on over include Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans who in response to problems with Lakoff's account developed the approach known as principled polysemy.