The article describes the process of retaining the recessive units in the correctness publications which have been the sources of the codified norm for the last hundred years. This includes the following forms: interesa, czochrze, w Prusiech. Such elements marked i.a. as rare, former, out of use or outdated belonged in the given period to the linguistic norm of some speakers of Polish. Therefore linguists made attempts to retain them in the codified norm at least for some time so that they could serve as evidence of their former correctness. They were used with qualifiers which provided information about potential question concerning the topicality of the recessive elements. Such units met different fates. They were no longer provided or perceived as wrong in the succeeding dictionaries that were examined. They often functioned as recessive until contemporaneity or even returned as equal variants. A detailed typology of these relations was discussed in the article.