This paper presents increased frequency of vocabulary related to climate
and health in public discourse and the position of this vocabulary in Polish and
foreign word of the year contests. The fi rst part of the text discusses the notion
of keywords, methods of their distinction, and word frequency monitoring works
at the University of Warsaw. These works are composed of: 1) monitoring of the
frequency of the vocabulary in daily newspapers against a comparable corpus
covering 12 months, 2) selection of the word of the month from the most frequent
words and describing it in philological terms, 3) word of the year contests using
the most frequent words as propositions. The second part of the paper presents
individual words from the lexical fi eld of climate selected as words of the month
and of the year, such as upał (heat), nawałnica (a storm), smog (smog), drzewo
(a tree), puszcza (a forest), klimat (climate). Part three demonstrates words from
this lexical fi eld in Polish and foreign word of the year contests. The discussed
lexical fi eld was divided into working categories: 1) “What the nature can do to
a human being”, e.g. nawałnica (a storm), smog (smog), and 2) “What a human
being does to the nature”, e.g. drzewo (a tree), puszcza (a forest) (tree cutting
in a forest), klimat (climate) (climate change). The latter category gathers words
with a greater symbolic power, more abstract, more appropriate as keywords in
the long run.
Keywords: keywords – frequency – word of the year contest – signifi cance of
a word – climate