The answer to the question, "What is meaning?", is not immediately
obvious. One section of philosophy of language tries to answer this
very question.

Geoffrey Leech posited that there are two essentially different types
of linguistic meaning: conceptual and associative. For Leech, the
conceptual meanings of an expression have to do with the definitions
of words themselves, and the features of those definitions. This kind
of meaning is treated by using a technique called the semantic feature
analysis. The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves
both definition (also called "connotation" and "intension" in the
literature) and extension (also called "denotation"). The associative
meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental
understandings of the speaker. They, in turn, can be broken up into
six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected
and thematic.[12]

Generally speaking, there have been at least six different kinds of
attempts at explaining what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been
associated with its own body of literature.