The growing orientation of public universities towards the corporate sector has had a sign ficant impact on higher education governance, management, and discourse. The rhetoric of the free market, man fested most tangibly in business-related lexis, is now firmly established in the discursive repertoire employed by academic leaders, politicians, and the media, as well as parts of higher education research. Within this rhetoric, enterprise and enterprising, as well as entrepreneur and entrepreneurial, stand out as keywords carrying sign ficant ideological loads (...) that reflect the colonisation of academia by the market. The organisational and policy-making implications of academic enterprise have received considerable attention from higher education researchers, while discourse analysts have identified general discursive features of the ‘marketised’ higher education landscape. What the present paper adds to the existing debate is an in-depth study of a set of keywords in which processes of adaptation and appropriation crystallise, thus showing how macro-level social phenomena are mirrored, on the micro-level of linguistic detail, in the collocational behaviour of individual lexical items. The textual data that this paper is based on, gleaned mostly from the Internet, show that entrepreneur, entrepreneurial, enterprise, and enterprising are ambiguous in denotation and rich in connotation, making them susceptible to processes of semantic appropriation to suit particular agendas. Prevailing motfs and representations are ident fled through a combination of the computer-supported survey of Web-based material and the qualitative analysis of sample texts. (shrink)