The article is devoted to the topical processes of lexical semantic renewal, caused by the necessity to reconsider the current politically and socially significant processes, determining the topical agenda. It is shown that the key vocabulary appears as the result of social reflection over the curremt situation. For the time being, the main source for replenishment of language lexical level is the media space — modern creative language laboratory. The processes of semantic renewal are organic, not artificial or forced. This is proved with the analysis of demanded models for word building — they are the same as in other spheres of language creation — as well as with the peculiarities of the new words’ life cycle: newly created lexical units, which comply with the laws of language system development, entrench themselves in the language; at the same time those units, which are non-conforming due to some reason, disappear irretrievably. We demonstrated word building models, which are demanded for creating current key vocabulary, by the example of words successfully grounded in the usage due to the necessity to consider the socially significant situation of Corona virus pandemic. There is a desemantization of terminological vocabulary, a transfer of abstract meaning into certain one, metaphorization among those. The lexical semantic analysis as well as the approach to content analysis allow demonstrating the peculiarities of such a vocabulary functioning in the media language and acquiring the signs of current moment keywords.