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The National Corpus of Polish contains a variety of text types and registers which can be searched to study the typical use of Polish words and the associations they trigger. This page presents a complementary type of analysis of word usage in the form of a regular report on the most frequent words found in the Polish press.
Words of the day and words of the week are those words whose frequency of occurrence in the newspapers published over the last day or week is significantly higher than could be expected from their frequencies in a reference period measured in months or years respectively. Using this assumption, we can pick up frequent proper names of people, places, companies and organisations as well as common nouns, verbs and adjectives which indicate the people and events which have recently become the focus of the media’s attention. By comparing daily and monthly frequencies with the reference periods, we can distinguish regularly frequent words from names of individuals, events and organisations that have only recently gained a statistically significant popularity. Our analysis often reveals the short-lived popularity of many common words and the associations they continue to trigger as they reappear in newspaper headlines or product names.
Words of the day, week, month or year are regularly selected by journalists, linguists and authors around the world. The choice of such words is often subjective and it may be based on novelty of usage or cognitive salience rather than statistical evidence. We hope that our regular word frequency reports can help journalists and commentators make such choices more data-driven. We leave it up to them to put a social or political interpretation on the results presented on this website.
