Oxford’s Word of the Year can’t escape virus

Oxford Languages’ annual Word of the Year is usually a tribute to the protean creativity of English and the reality of constant linguistic change, throwing a spotlight on zeitgeisty neologisms like “selfie,” “vape” and “unfriend.”

But then came 2020, and youknow-what.

This year, Oxford Languages, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has forgone the selection of a single word in favour of highlighting the coronavirus pandemic’s swift and sudden linguistic effect on English.

“What struck the team as most distinctive in 2020 was the sheer scale and scope of change,” Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of product, said. “This event was experienced globally and by its nature changed the way we express every other thing that happened this year.”

The Word of the Year is meant “to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of the preceding year, while also having “lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.”

The 2020 report does highlight some zippy new coinages, but mostly, it underlines how the pandemic has utterly dominated public conversation, and given us a new collective vocabulary almost overnight.

Take, for starters, “pandemic”: Use of the term increased more than 57,000 per cent since last year. “Coronavirus” also surged, breaking away from run-of-the-mill topical words. Back in January, it was neckand-neck with “impeachment,” then surging because of the proceedings against President Donald Trump. But by April, “coronavirus” had become one of the most common nouns in English. That, Martin said, is highly unusual. Usually, when a topical word surges, she said, “it becomes more common relative to other topical words, but not relative to words we all say in English all the time.”

The Oxford report also highlights words and phrases relating to social justice, including “Black Lives Matter,” “Juneteenth,” “decolonize,” and “allyship,” some of which surged dramatically following the killing of George Floyd. But those increases were nowhere near pandemic-related terms.

So … is it fair to say that in 2020, even the words were, well, kind of terrible? Martin declined to be so negative, but said she hoped 2021 would bring more “fun, positive words that didn’t seem to hold the weight of the world on their shoulders.”