Appearance of New Terms in Accounting Language: A Preliminary Examination of Accounting Pronouncements and Financial Statements

ABSTRACT: Accounting language evolves as the transactions and organizations it provides guidance for change. We provide a preliminary analysis of terms used in official accounting pronouncements and annual corporate financial statements. Initial results show statistical natural language‐processing techniques provide a means of identifying new terms as they enter the lexicon. These techniques should be valuable in deriving a complete accounting lexicon as well as in constructing and maintaining an accounting thesaurus to support information retrieval.