The article deals with the new trends in the use of euphemisms and dysphemisms in the modern British press. There is a linguistic situation, which is characterized by a deliberate refusal to use positively connoted vocabulary, hiding or masking the true meaning of the statement. The analysis is carried out on the material of the electronic versions of the newspapers “The Guardian” and “Independent”.

The article is devoted to the semantic features of the multicomponent compound words in modern English. The three-component composites are considered in the text function. Depending on the various degrees of the semantic motivation,thenon-idiomatic and idiomatic composites are found out. The high productivity of these units is proved by the tendencies of analytism and the desire for speech compression.