The aims of this study have been to examine how the lexemes girl, woman and lady and their plural forms are currently used in British English, as well as to see if this usage has changed during the last decade. The focus has been on the affective meaning of these terms. According to previously made studies there have been indications of possible changes in usage of these terms. In order to perform this study, a total of six hundred occurrences of girl/girls, woman/women and lady/ladies were gathered from two corpora of written British English. The differences in frequency between the lexemes were then studied, as well as the different ways these terms have been used. The results show that woman/women are the terms most frequently used, whereas lady/ladies are the terms least used. The results also indicate a possible increase of girl/girls and woman/women in negative usage, and this increase seems to be due to more sexual connotations. The results from this study also support the hypothesis that there might be a possible change in usage of the term lady/ladies. There are indications of lady/ladies having increased in usage with positive affective meaning, and the difference seems to consist of an increased usage of lady as a marker of solidarity or as a marker of feistiness. No general conclusions regarding the usage can be drawn from this study, but there are indications that suggest changing attitudes towards the female terms lady/ladies, woman/women and girl/girls. Nyckelord: affective meaning, British English, corpus study, female terms,