In Anglophone public discourse, the word crisis plays a significant role in discussion of critical events and situations across a wide range of domains. This paper discusses the word’s status as a keyword in mainstream Anglophone discourse, unpacks its semantic contents through natural semantics metalanguage and corpus-assisted collocational analysis, and explores the ideological and cultural assumptions underpinning its usage. It finds that the idea of “government” is central to the meaning of crisis and that the contemporary use of the word not only signals a systematic problem, but also legitimates government actions and the general public’s expectations, reflecting a particular way of thinking about the state and its involvement in liberal society and a shift away from the classical interpretation of the role of government. The study also raises questions about interpreting critical world events and analysing political discourse through the lens of crisis and its related concepts.