Concordance

“refugees” in the General Debate

8,292 uses across 80 years of statements. First recorded in 1946; used most in 2016, when it appeared 332 times across 122 statements by 122 speakers.

What this counts, and what it does not. This is the number of times the spellings refugee, refugees appear in the text of General Debate statements, matched on word boundaries and ignoring case. It is a fact about a word. It is not a measure of how much any state cared about the subject, what position it took, or whether it meant it — and nothing on this page should be read that way.

The final year of this series is machine-transcribed from the official simultaneous interpretation rather than taken from a UN transcript, so it counts what a transcriber heard. See session 80.

Used most by

A state that speaks every year has more chances to use a word than one admitted in 2011, and a state whose statements are longer has more again. These are counts, not rates.