The article discusses the notion of key words in linguistics, from cultural semantics to the strictly statistical approach of determining the words that identify texts of particular authors or periods. The authors then present 'words of the week' of the Polish daily newspaper 'Rzeczpospolita' - lists of proper names and common words whose relative frequency of occurrence in particular weeks is distinctly higher compared to the last quarter. The key words of consecutive weeks were categorised according to their durability over longer periods of time: in a quarter as compared to the last three years and in the last three years as compared to the vocabulary of the Polish press of the 1990's to date from the 'PWN Corpus of Polish'. It has been found that key words in the language of the press are connected with current affairs and none of them are words considered to be of key importance for Polish culture in general by researchers in cultural semantics.
