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Age-based discrimination, conceptualized in the United States fifty years ago under the term “ageism,” is today at the heart of a transnational and interdisciplinary field of research, which is nonetheless not well known in sociology. This article both presents the conceptual framework for this field of research and makes a contribution to it. It begins by drawing attention to certain oversights in the common definitions of ageist practices, before exploring the polysemy of the category of age itself in order to better identify the variety of forms of age-based discrimination. The article provides an analytical distinction between three meanings of “age”: chronological age, situation in the conventional stages of the life course (or age status), and the physiological transformations associated with the aging process (bodily aging). The article demonstrates that this analytical distinction helps shed light on the different practices that are described as ageist. Finally, the article argues that this is a heuristic distinction for sociological studies which, although they may not explicitly refer to the term “ageism,” deal with forms of classification, segregation, hierarchization, and domination based on age differences between individuals.