AbstractDue to its specific linguistic properties, the language found in clinical records has been characterized as a distinct sublanguage. Even within the clinical domain, though, there are major differences in language use, which has led to more fine-grained distinctions based on medical fields and document types. However, previous work has mostly neglected the influence of term variation. By contrast, we propose to integrate the potential for term variation in the characterization of clinical sublanguages. By analyzing a corpus of clinical records, we show that the different sections of these records vary systematically with regard to their lexical, terminological and semantic composition, as well as their potential for term variation. These properties have implications for automatic term recognition, as they influence the performance of frequency-based term weighting.