Contemporary criticism has evolved beyond mere classification, evaluation, and value determination, and is now recognized as a philosophical process of understanding and interpretation. The critic’s role is to trace the process of semantic dissemination within a creative text and to convey all possible meanings to the readers. To interpret and derive meanings from literary texts, it is essential for critics to possess linguistic, particularly semantic, awareness. Both Eastern and Western traditions have developed various disciplines related to meaning that engage with the meanings present in texts on multiple levels. The awareness of concepts such as singular and fixed meanings versus ambiguous, multifaceted, continuously changing, and deferred meanings enables the interpreter or commentator to extract plausible and reasonable interpretations. Different disciplines related to meaning exhibit varying approaches to meaning and the process of meaning-making. This paper will review three such disciplines—rhetoric (علم المعانی), semantics (معنیات), and semiotics (سیمیات)—to explore their relationship with meaning, the multiplicity of meaning, and the process of meaning-making.