The lexicon can be considered the most dynamic part of all linguistic knowledge sources over time. There are two innovative change strategies typical for lexical systems: the creation of entirely new lexical items, commonly reflecting the emergence of novel ideas, technologies or artifacts, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, shifts in the meaning of already existing lexical items, a process which usually takes place over larger periods of time. Tracing semantic changes of the latter type is the main focus of our research. Meaning shift has recently been investigated with emphasis on neural language models<cite> (Kim et al., 2014</cite>; Kulkarni et al., 2015) .