Abstract
The given article examines the vocabulary in social discourse, which has gained relevance in connection with the disease of the century Covid-19. The analysis is based on four articles from the German newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Tagesschau. For comparison, information is provided from a review of British and American newspapers in October 2020. The lexical units are components and fragments of discourses that, in the last decade, have attracted more attention of not only philologists, but also scientists from other areas of the social sciences and humanities. Language units are divided into specific semantic categories. The article illustrates specific factual material, and also compared their semantic derivation with facts extracted from authoritative dictionaries. Since some linguistic units, due to their "freshness", do not have time to find their place in dictionaries, their semantic categories are determined in contexts. In addition, linguistic units are categorized into specific thematic types and semantic categories.