The theme of 'embodiment' has become an important approach in current mathematics education research, growing in significance from the mid-1990s onward. However terminology of 'body' and 'embodiment' is used to signal multiple, widely varying meanings in this research. Studies are grounded in a number of radically different theoretical bases, with the result that mathematics education researchers do not necessarily mean the same thing at all when they refer to 'body', 'embodiment' and 'embodied mathematics learning'. In this theoretical paper, the author offers a framework for interpreting these polysemous terms in relation to their theoretical groundings, with examples from the mathematics education literature. [For the complete proceedings, see ED597799.]