Parliament's changing words: what Singapore stopped saying, and what it never said before

The boring bit

Where the data comes from

Parliament of Singapore's Hansard search, which holds 46,357 records from 1955 to October 2026. We asked it, word by word, how many records in each period mention the word. We read the records of 44 sittings to choose the words, then kept only counts. We do not copy, store or show any of the records' text, speakers or parties. The records belong to the Parliament of Singapore. This page is not endorsed by it.

What is not claimed

• These are counts of records that mention a word, not of how many times it was said. A long debate and a one-line written answer each count once.
• The number of records in Parliament's search grew from 2,689 in the 1970s to 16,497 in the 2020s so far, partly because written answers are now separate records. Only large changes are safe to read as real.
• Words were found in recent speech (2016 onward), because that is where we could read the text. A word that was common long ago and has vanished would not have been picked.
• The search does not group word forms, so we count each word as singular and plural. Other forms, such as “planning” for “plan”, are separate words and are not added.
• Some words were once written as two words or with a hyphen, such as “health-care”. We checked each word that splits into two real words. Where the older spelling was common, the page says so under the picture, and the older spelling is not counted.
• The search's counts can move by one or two between asks. A period's total is the highest of three asks.
• The 2020s so far include the COVID years, when sittings and the questions asked were unusual, and runs to the date shown.
• A word appearing is not a position on anything. We do not look at who said it, which party they belong to, or whether they were for or against.
• This says nothing about whether any policy worked.

How the words were chosen, and what was left out

• 449 words passed the rule (nouns and acronyms in at least 1% of sampled records, at least 5 times more common than in everyday English).
• Left out as the way a debate is run: accordance, amendment, beg, clause, debate, oral, premise, provision, speech, withdrawn. Left out as transcript or question wording: applause, consideration, example, hon, instance, proc, question, regard, reply, text.
• Left out as sensitive subjects or labels for groups of people: deterrence, deterrent, discrimination, fatality, foreigner, harassment, imprisonment, laundering, misuse, offence, offender, penalty, perpetrator, prosecution, scam.
• Left out as leftovers of the plural rule, adjectives the tagger took for nouns, or non-words: cha, covid-, crise, healthier, monetary, mony, wider.
• Acronyms: 13 kept (ASEAN, BTO, CEO, COVID, CPF, GCE, GDP, GST, HDB, ICT, MRT, SME, UK). 47 left out because they are names of ministries, agencies, schools, unions, parties or election terms, or are too short to search safely.
• Left out because they clash with this site's wording rules: 2 words (the rules ban them in visible text). They are named in the code.
• Group rules, so small groups are never ranked: “Barely said before 1990” needs 2 or fewer records before 1990 (older spellings counted) and at least 2% of records now. “Had their moment” needs a busiest period from the 1960s to the 1990s with at least 100 records and 1 in 20 records or more, and a share now of 60% of that or less, ranked by how big the peak was. Words matched as moving the same way need 30 records in some period. The “Said most now” row is simply the words in the most records in the 2020s so far.
• Left out of the featured rows, but still in the search box: COVID and pandemic. Their rise is obvious and would take two of the eight places.
• Choosing what to leave out is a judgement. The full lists are in the code.

Coverage

To choose the words we read 3,099 records from 44 of the 334 sittings since 2016, four sittings a year spread evenly. The search lists 3,128 records for those sittings and we listed 3,114 of them. That is a sample, so the word list could differ slightly if every sitting were read. The counts for each word come from the search of all 46,357 records, not from the sample.

Report an error. Corrections are logged publicly with a date.

def lemma(t):
    """Plural to singular, by rule: agencies -> agency, businesses -> business, premises -> premise."""
    if len(t) > 4 and t.endswith('ies'): return t[:-3] + 'y'
    if len(t) > 5 and t.endswith(('sses', 'xes', 'ches', 'shes')): return t[:-2]
    if len(t) > 3 and t.endswith('s') and not t.endswith(('ss', 'us', 'is')): return t[:-1]
    return t


def plural(w):
    if re.search(r'[^aeiou]y$', w): return w[:-1] + 'ies'
    if w.endswith(('s', 'x', 'ch', 'sh')): return w + 'es'
    return w + 's'


def union_count(w, a, b, cache=None):
    """Records with the word in either form: singular + plural - records with both."""
    f0, f1 = w, plural(w)
    parts = []
    for q in (f0, f1, f0 + " " + f1):
        key = f"{q}|{a}|{b}"
        if cache is not None and key in cache: n = cache[key]
        else:
            n = ask(q, a, b)
            if cache is not None: cache[key] = n
        parts.append(n)
    return parts[0] + parts[1] - parts[2], parts

Source: Singapore Parliament Hansard (sprs.parl.gov.sg), searched 4 Oct 2026. We found no open data licence for Hansard, so the page shows only counts of records, never their text. Not endorsed by Parliament.