ABSTRACT
The article presents the linguistic image of the noun pandemic in contemporary Polish. The aim of the analysis is to look at how the word is used today, in the COVID-19 era, and how it was used before the first cases of this disease were detected. The first part of the article discusses the current data available on the Words of the Day website, Google Trends and the MoncoPL corpus search engine, while the second part shows the occurrences of the lexeme in slightly older texts that were collected in the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) before 2010. The analysis of the material extracted from the above sources indicates that that the noun pandemic was very rare in the NKJP and then became very popular with the appearance of the pathogen causing COVID-19. However, the analysis of the most common collocates shows that the mentioned event did not have a significant impact on the other aspects of the use of the lexeme by the users of modern Polish.