The aim of this paper is to find out if the usage of compounds ending with challenged is increasing, as well as to see if there is an ongoing trend to invent new ones. The study is based on a corpus of two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, from four different years, 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002. The term challenged was firstly used as an adjective in the politically correct (PC) compound physically challenged, which means ‘handicapped’. However, even though the term physically challenged was meant to be serious it was not always considered as such, and especially the media started to use challenged in various humorous compounds. Therefore, as a part of my investigation, I have also checked if challenged compounds are ever used seriously or if they are only used humorously. This study has clearly indicated that the ongoing trend to create and use challenged compounds is in fact increasing. There is also an indication that a few compounds are being used seriously, but those are by far outnumbered by humorously used compounds. When the challenged compounds were divided into different categories, we could see that the most frequently used compounds had something to do with appearance. Moreover, most of the compounds found in this study had something to do with personal qualities, skills and looks, which are all categories that are rather easy to use humorously. Nyckel ord: Politically correct language, challenged, compounds