The weight of words: Applying concreteness to elite media language.

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.