The article puts forward a hypothesis stating that 'tolerancja' (a tolerance) is an ambiguous word. In order to prove the hypothesis the authoress refers to collocations of the noun 'tolerancja' by showing its etymology and changes in meaning. The article presents two main usages of the noun 'tolerancja' which are given by dictionaries of contemporary Polish. Apparently, each usage has a different syntactic structure. The authoress focuses on the one which is described by Leszek Kolakowski and tries to confront the meaning of 'tolerancja' and 'obojetnosc' (an indifference).