The goal of this work is to bring semantics into the tasks of text recognition and retrieval in natural images. Al-though text recognition and retrieval have received a lot of attention in recent years, previous works have focused on recognizing or retrieving exactly the same word used as a query, without taking the semantics into consideration. In this paper, we ask the following question: can we pre-dict semantic concepts directly from a word image, with-out explicitly trying to transcribe the word image or its characters at any point? For this goal we propose a con-volutional neural network (CNN) with a weighted ranking loss objective that ensures that the concepts relevant to the query image are ranked ahead of those that are not rele-vant. This can also be interpreted as learning a Euclidean space where word images and concepts are jointly embed-ded. This model is learned in an end-to-end manner, from image pixels to semantic concepts, using a dataset of syn-thetically generated word images and concepts mined from a lexical database (WordNet). Our results show that, de-spite the complexity of the task, word images and concepts can indeed be associated with a high degree of accuracy. 1.