The subject of this article are the words which in the 20th century fell into disuse, changed meanings or, and that is most interesting, came back to the contemporary Polish people language, in spite of being in the language archives before. The authoress refers to the linguistic works concerning the 'out of fashion' words published dozens of years ago and investigates present state of these words in Polish. She indicates the reasons of these words coming back to contemporary Polish, like: political, social and economic transformation in Poland after 1989, changes connected with fashion, likes and dislikes etc. In the second part of this article she treats of one type of the lexical units - compositions which fell into disuse during the 20th century. She presents them in several semantic groups, eg. culinaries, cosmetics, clothes and shoes, school, house and its equipment, social life. She pays attention to the fact that going out of one word or composition may give occasion to going out of another words connected with it and also may cause entering the new words which denominate some new 'things'.