Abstract
<jats:p>The study aims to obtain reliable data on the evolution of the lexeme “сутки” (twenty-four hours) in the Russian language, the breadth and dynamics of its semantic spectrum, and its syntagmatics, relying on data from explanatory, etymological, and historical dictionaries of the Russian language, as well as the Russian National Corpus. The choice of the word “сутки” is determined by its cultural specificity, as many other languages of the world lack a single-word equivalent to designate this concept. The scientific novelty of the study lies in creating a historical “portrait” of the lexeme “сутки” based on both lexicographical and corpus data. For the first time, this work examines the evolution of the semantics and collocability of the word “сутки” on a broad empirical base. As a result of the study, the meanings inherent to the word “сутки” are identified in their historical dynamics, along with the associates most characteristic of the chosen lexeme that define its normative collocability. The dictionary entries and multi-genre (multi-style) contexts analyzed in the paper prove a significant transformation of the original meaning, stemming from the origin of this abstract temporal category’s nomination from a concrete noun preserved in dialects.</jats:p>