From 1852 to 1855 Steinthal resided in Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of Chinese, and in 1863 he was appointed assistant professor at the Berlin University; from 1872 he was also privat-dozent in critical history of the Old Testament and in religious philosophy at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums.
The term was used in 1859 by German philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft.
The general concept of apraxia and the classification of ideomotor apraxia were developed in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the work of Hugo Liepmann, Adolph Kussmaul, Arnold Pick, Paul Flechsig, Hermann Munk, Carl Nothnagel, Theodor Meynert, and linguist Heymann Steinthal, among others.