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Peer-reviewedCC BY 4.0PLOS One

The weight of words: Applying concreteness to elite media language

  • Donald Snyder1
  1. 1Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, United States of America
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Abstract

This study introduces lexical “concreteness” – a psycholinguistic measure of vivid language – as a scalable tool for political and news text analysis. Using a dictionary of approximately 40,000 English word lemmas rated for concreteness, this construct is applied to more than two million New York Times articles published between 2000 and 2025. Exploratory analyses show that average concreteness declines over time in headlines and abstracts and varies systematically across material categories, document formats, print page placement, and article length. Descriptive formats, including news reports and biographies or obituaries, generally use more concrete language than editorial or opinion content. Taken together, these analyses suggest that concreteness may be a meaningful linguistic feature in the political news context, capturing unique stylistic features in media language.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{snyder2026weight,
  title = {{The weight of words: Applying concreteness to elite media language}},
  author = {Donald Snyder},
  journal = {PLOS One},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0359092},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359092},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - The weight of words: Applying concreteness to elite media language
AU  - Donald Snyder
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/01
JO  - PLOS One
DO  - 10.1371/journal.pone.0359092
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359092
AB  - This study introduces lexical “concreteness” – a psycholinguistic measure of vivid language – as a scalable tool for political and news text analysis. Using a dictionary of approximately 40,000 English word lemmas rated for concreteness, this construct is applied to more than two million New York Times articles published between 2000 and 2025. Exploratory analyses show that average concreteness declines over time in headlines and abstracts and varies systematically across material categories, document formats, print page placement, and article length. Descriptive formats, including news reports and biographies or obituaries, generally use more concrete language than editorial or opinion content. Taken together, these analyses suggest that concreteness may be a meaningful linguistic feature in the political news context, capturing unique stylistic features in media language.
SN  - 1932-6203
ER  -