The article is devoted to the analysis of the meaning of the Old Polish lexeme gędźba, which was inherited from the Proto‑Slavic * gǫdьba against the background of its equivalents in Old Bohemian and Old Russian. The inspiration was the text of prof. W. Boryś on the Proto‑Slavic musical vocabulary. Semantic analysis has shown that in Old Polish, Old Bohemian and Old Russian languages, the continuants of the Proto‑Slavic * gǫdьba had a meaning limited to playing a specific type of instrument, as in Proto‑Slavic. So the words did not refer to the notion of music in the general sense, but only to a certain part of it. This testifies to the absence of a general notion of music in the Middle Ages in the Polish language area and is a continuation of the original Slavic state. But the old concept, which was called gędźba, had some characteristics that have been transfered to the later concept „music”, called a new word borrowed from the Latin.