The article presents a linguo-political diachronic and discourse-oriented study of the phenomenon of strategy. Drawing on material from several languages, the study demonstrates how the semantic core of the word — originally associated with “military leadership” and “military ingenuity or cunning” has gradually faded, while the term has been enriched with new semantic components under the influence of various discourses. Using lexicographic and lexical-semantic analysis, the paper identifies shifts in the meanings of words with the root strategthat occurred during the borrowing of Ancient Greek lexical units into Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Russian, and English. Corpus-based and contextual analysis provides evidence of a significant expansion in the domains of use of strategwords, accompanied by a narrowing of meaning toward an abstract semantics of goal-setting. Cognitive-discursive analysis reveals the specific ways in which the concept of strategy is conceptualized in military, political, and diplomatic discourses, manifested in the addition of semantic components related to long-term planning, calculation of efficiency, and similar features. The article emphasizes that historical semantic shifts signal broader processes: as the lexical unit undergoes determinologization and enters wider usage, its meaning becomes significantly narrowed through abstraction. The study concludes by identifying the emergence of the meta-concept grand strategy, understood as the necessity of mobilizing all available resources in order to participate in the global governance of world political processes.