Studia Językoznawcze

This article aims to provide a multi-dimensional description of psychological vocabulary marked with an exclamation point by the editors of The Warsaw Dictionary in the early 20th century – a usage paraqualifier signifying ‘do not use.’ The study also examines possible reasons for such qualification. A formal analysis revealed that the largest category consists of terms not compliant with the lexical norm, while terms incompliant with phonetic or orthographic norms are much less common. There were no lexemes in the sample which were incompliant with the inflectional norm. The disapproval of these words by the normative source is attributed to historical-linguistic factors (i.e., withdrawal of obsolete terms, creation of neologisms, and removal of redundant elements) and extralinguistic factors (i.e., purist language policy, Gallomania, the impact of partitioners’ languages, and advances in science and technology). In spite of the decisions made by the editors of The Warsaw Dictionary, 17 out of the 72 lexemes marked with an exclamation point in The Warsaw Dictionary have persisted in modern usage. Ten of these are included in the Great Dictionary of the Polish Language Language [Wielki słownik języka polskiego], including emocjonować, emocjonować się, somnambulik, somnambuliczny, zbulwersować, nonszalancja lit., and degrengolada lit., while another set of ten is recorded by Adrianna Seniów (astenia, dypsomania, noktambulizm, parestezja, prostracja, senorium, splen), with three lexemes appearing in both sources: erotoman, splin, somnambulizm med. psych.).