The topic of this paper is to establish the main features of semantic relations in the social sciences terminology based on the hypothesis that the same semantic relations are present in terminology as well as in the standard language and that there is an interdependence between the standard language and the language for special purposes. The terms taken from terminology dictionaries which confirm different semantic phenomena (polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, metonymy, paronymy, homonymy) are analyzed. The lack of systematization in the past analyses in dictionaries of the Croatian language and in terminology dictionaries can be noticed due to the lack of established criteria for the analysis of the terms or the lack of systematization in their application. The semantic analysis includes the terms excerpated from terminology dictionaries in the corpus of Croatian Language Treasury and in professional literature, especially in the publistic functional style. A special attention is paid to the difference between terminological and determinological use of terms and metaphorical shifts of the meaning. Based on the corpus, a numerous omissions in the term analysis in general and terminology dictionaries (omission of the usual meaning or incorrectly defined meaning) can be noticed. After the analysis, the conclusions are made for each of the analyzed semantic phenomena, the systematization of the analyzed terms is defined and the possible faults are indicated. Accordingly, the proposal of the term analysis is given in the standard and terminology dictionaries. The term analysis includes the establishing the most usual procedures in term formation and the list of the analyzed terms is attached to the thesis. This study confirms the frequency of terminologization and determinologization processes in the social sciences terminology and metaphorization as the basic way of term formation. The interdependence of terminologization and determinologization processes also confirms the interdependence of the standard language and the language for special purposes. The study of the language for special purposes is not possible without the standard language and the standard language contains numerous terms which are determinologized due to the communication needs.