This corpus study focuses on the evaluative connotation of the nouns bitch and female, and whether they have been subjected to any semantic change between the years 2009-2019. Additionally, it also looks at the word’s referent to see if it can be correlated to its connotation. Tokens are collected from Corpora of Contemporary American English (COCA) and assigned a status as either positive, negative or neutral, along with a label as self-labelled, applied or other. They are analysed year by year, and always within the context in which they are found. The results show that there has been a slight change in the evaluative connotation of bitch, from more pejorative to more generalized, but that the change of female is very small. The referent is not found to be highly significant, but a small overrepresentation of self-labelled tokens within the positive uses can be seen.