The volume Implicit Meanings was first published by Routledge in 1975 and was reprinted in 1978 and 1991. It went into a second edition in 1999, with revisions and additional material (including a new preface), which was reprinted in 2001, and again in 2003 as volume 5 of Mary Douglas: Collected Works (). The essays printed had originally appeared in journals, such as Man or Daedalus, or as contributions to scholarly collections.
