The goal of this article is to investigate whether the verb chcieć 'to want' is a definible notion. A. Wierzbicka locates this predicate on her first list of semantic primitives (1972), A. Bogusławski, on the other hand, proposes to decompose this verb into a "feeling a deficit" 1998a). Apart from these references some other proposals are presented. First of all, the author tries to distinguish units withe the shape chcieć based on inflectional and syntactical differences. Several intuitions included in proper definitions taken from contemporary Polish dictionaries are also commented upon (SJPDor, ISJP, USJP). The paper implements as the analytic tool advanced structuralist semantics developed by Bogusławski (see: 1976, 1994, 1998b, 2007, Danielewiczowa 2002, Wajszczuk 1997).