ABSTRACT:Television and print media during the 1991 Gulf War exposed the English‐speaking world to word‐formation patterns that produced neologisms and analogical forms. The language of the military briefing room became the language of media reportage. Established patterns were employed to create new forms with new meanings. The data are taken from the television and print media in the USA. This paper analyzes a corpus of data from television and radio broadcasts for purposes of assessing the open‐ended corpus as a source of variation, the productivity of forms, the extension of meaning, and the implications for the use of corpus data for teaching patterns of word‐formation in