This corpus analysis of written American news language investigates the linguistic manifestations of gender stereotypes both at present and diachronically by looking at adjectival premodifiers of WOMAN and MAN, as well as the relative frequencies of the singular and plural forms of WOMAN and MAN. The findings indicate that there is a clear difference in how women and men are conceptualized in American news language, with a strong emphasis on appearance when it comes to descriptions of women and a strong emphasis on personality when it comes to descriptions of men. Moreover, women tend to be described as a collective using the plural women more often than not, while men tend to be referred to as individuals using the singular man more often than the plural men. Thus some of the essential female- and male qualities stipulated by prevailing gender stereotypes – that women are and should be more concerned with appearance than with personality, while the reverse is true of men – are clearly born out in the findings of this study. Furthermore, the stereotypical conception of men as independent subjects who act and women as dependent objects who are acted upon is similarly confirmed in these findings by the use of the singular form to refer to men and the plural form to refer to women. However, while some aspects of the gender stereotypes appear to remain rigidly fixed over time, there seems to be a trend towards including more personality descriptors in references to women.