The paper presents collocations of the noun wojna ‘war’ from the diachronic perspective. Gathered from historical dictionaries of the Polish language, the collocations amply illustrate four different meanings of the lexeme: ‘conflict’, ‘fight’, ‘military expedition’ and ‘army’.
In respect of grammar, the collocations with verbs decidedly predominate, adequately reflecting the dynamic nature of war and a metaphorical way of its representation as the elements of fire and storm, the manner recorded by the collocations with nouns as well. A vast repertoire of the collocations documents beginning, waging and ending of war. Various parameters of war, such as time, space, strategy, are described by the collocations with adjectives, which also linguistically reflect emotions determined by war and bear testimony to its values from a relative point of view. Many of the collocations are characterized by considerable durability, therefore they have been preserved in the contemporary language.