I analyse the occurrence of time terminology in the texts and manuscripts of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) up until the beginning of his Geneva years in 1891. This is an interesting period with regard to Saussure's terminological research on time and language. For instance, the word diachronie doesn't appear until 1891. I draw conclusions about this Saussurean research based on the explicit use of the term and its contexts in published texts and in unpublished manuscript. I survey the occurrences of the terms by analysing the corpus following a chronological criterion. Finally, I provide a hypothesis on the appari-tion and origins of the terms.