Following the war in Syria, numerous debates regarding displaced people have placed immigration in the political and media spotlight. A wide range of factors have contributed to creating these discursive events in the media as well as the representations that circulate in society about migration. Words defining people on the move (e.g. refugee, migrant, immigrant, asylum-seeker, illegal, displaced person, etc.) are not fixed in time, their meaning and reference evolve according to events and social representations, contributing to constructing both the public issue and the image of the social actors involved.The aim of this research was to document, through a lexical discourse analysis (implemented through a combination of Discursive Semantics with Corpus Linguistics), the lexical repertoire of denominations used to name people on the move and the evolution of the meaning of these terms in the Belgian national media in French and Dutch. The main research question was the following: How does the repertoire of denominations to name people on the move unfold in the Belgian media during the 2015-2017 migratory crisis?To answer this research question, an exhaustive corpus composed of press articles and evening news items was collected in Belgium’s French- and Dutch-speaking communities. For each community and each type of medium (press and TV), the media of record and the popular one with the largest audience were analysed. The corpus contains 13,391 articles and 3490 news broadcasts representing 7,637,986 words in total. The corpus spans from March 2015 to July 2017. This research concludes with four main results. First, there is great lexical creativity as more than 260 denominations were found in both the Francophone and Flemish corpus, from those most fixed in language to those less fixed and temporary. This lexical productivity can be explained by the need of politicians and journalists to describe new categories or specific cases. It also shows the permeability of media discourse to political discourse, to the ...