Modern English includes a range of standard and nonstandard varieties that are spoken around the world and differ at all levels of language structure. The purpose of this article is to overview international variation of English lexis, discover similarities intersecting this diversity, find out about productive patterns of lexical change and interpret them from a cognitive perspective. The paper demonstrates the importance of internal and external sources of borrowing, considers the ways of coining new vocabulary, gives attention to efficient strategies employed to name colonial settings and to distinguish newly forming identities from British and other English-speaking communities. Varying experience of adjustment to overseas environments stimulated a high degree of lexical change and heteronymy. Although in different regions English emerged from unique colonial contexts, speakers’ precolonial experience, knowledge and intuitions about the world played a significant role in the processes of categorization and conceptualization, and hence naming. It is argued that it is possible to discern common cognitive ground for such diversity in lexis.