The present paper aims to discuss the notion of context as it appears in historical pragmatics, and, especially, in research concerning semantic change in grammaticalization. It presents the context types provided in Heine (2002) and Diewald (2002), which are supposed to be important in semantic change in grammaticalization. After discussing the characteristics of critical context , proposed in Diewald’s (2002) typology, the paper highlights why the expression context as used in grammaticalization literature cannot be understood as the context of online utterance interpretation. First, this notion of context is narrower than the context of online language processing in the sense that it contains only those contextual features which are important in semantic change. Second, the context in which linguists today interpret historical utterances differs from that one which plausibly could have played a role in utterance interpretation of contemporary language users. Third, the concept of context in the relevant literature reveals a mixture of features of context in utterance interpretation and context as a methodological phenomenon.