It should come as no surprise that the 2020 top word, according to the Merriam-Webster website is ‘Pandemic’. See more below.
According to Peter Sokolowski, in a statement to The Associated Press, it “probably isn’t a big shock [that] pandemic” is the 2020 top word for America’s most trusted online dictionary for English word definitions, meanings and pronunciation.
Sokolowski, who is the editor at large for Merriam-Webster further said; “Often the big news story has a technical word that’s associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. It’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period in the future.”
On the dictionary’s website, there was a 115,806% increase in the volume of searches for ‘pandemic’ on 11th March 2020. However, the increased traffic began in January of this year and has remained high.
See also: Heart to heart: On the fragility of life amid the Coronavirus pandemic
The word ‘pandemic’ has roots in Latin and Greek and is formed from two words, “pan” and “demos”. Pan denotes “all” while demos means “people” or “population”. Pandemic originated from the mid-1600s and while it used to mean “universal”, medical texts in the 1660s started using it more. Likely, after the plagues in the Middle Ages.
Merriam-Webster team also added and updated entries on its site for words relating to the pandemic. It added ‘COVID-19’ around March/April 2020 but ‘coronavirus’ has existed for decades before 2020.
Peter Sokolowski mentioned that it took 34 days for the company to add COVID-19 to its site after it was coined. “That’s the shortest period of time we’ve ever seen a word go from coinage to entry. The word had this urgency,” he said.
Other top words in 2020 besides pandemic and coronavirus are quarantine, asymptomatic, mamba, Kraken, defund, antebellum, irregardless, icon, schadenfreude and malarkey.
Interesting