WORD OF THE FEAR
Pandemic tops dictionary lists as most searched in 2020
Here’s a shocker: In a year dominated by COVID-19, “pandemic” has been named the top word of 2020.
Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com both announced Monday that “pandemic” is the word of the year.
The first declaration came from Merriam-Webster, which said search results for “pandemic” skyrocketed as coronavirus cases surged throughout the world.
“Sometimes a single word defines an era, and it’s fitting that in this exceptional — and exceptionally difficult — year, a single word came immediately to the fore as we examined the data that determines what our Word of the Year will be,” Merriam-Webster explained in its announcement.
The dictionary said searches for “pandemic” began to rise on its website in January. The largest spike occurred on March 11, when the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus crisis a pandemic. On that day, Merriam-Webster saw the number of searches increase by 115,806% compared with the same day in 2019.
“Pandemic” has remained among the most-searched words on the Merriam-Webster website ever since, the company said.
Later on Monday morning, Dictionary.com said “pandemic” is its 2020 word of the year, too.
On March 11, Dictionary.com saw the number of “pandemic” searches rise by more than 13,500%.
“That’s massive, but even more telling is how high it has sustained significant search volumes throughout the entire year,” John Kelly, a senior research editor for the dictionary, told The Associated Press. “Month over month, it was over 1,000% higher than usual,” he continued. “For about half the year, it was in the top 10% of all our lookups.”
Merriam-Webster defines a pandemic as “an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affects a significant proportion of the population.”
The definition by Dictionary. com, meanwhile, says a pandemic refers to when a disease is “prevalent throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world.”
There have been more than 62 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and more than 1.4 million deaths.
The Oxford English Dictionary took a different approach and decided not to declare a single word of the year for 2020. In a report last week, publisher Oxford Languages said too many words received spikes, such as “coronavirus,” which then led to new terms, like “COVID” or “COVID-19.”
Other words and phrases linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, such as “systemic racism” and the “BLM” abbreviation, also saw in increase in searches, the publisher said.
“The English language, like all of us, has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year,” Oxford Languages explained. “Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.”