The Changing Meanings of Political Terms and Their Reflection in Dictionaries

Abstract

When observing media texts, one cannot help but notice that some political terms are used with a meaning widely different from that offered by mainstream middle-size dictionaries, which generally stick to the initial, sometimes etymological senses. Corpora analysis confirms the shift in senses and divergence of use. The aim of this paper is to analyse the meaning and use of two terms ubiquitous in the public sphere: fascist/fascism and liberal/liberalism, their original meanings, and subsequent changes in meaning and use. Though the limited space available for defining terms in a general explanatory dictionary makes it extremely difficult to reflect all ideological tinges and meanings, where a frequently used political term seems to have developed stable, different, even opposite meanings, this should be reflected by introducing ideological polysemy in dictionary definitions.