Both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com have announced the Word Of The Year for 2020. They both choose the same word – Pandemic. Certainly not a surprise for this year.
Merriam-Webster released a statement – “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,”
They mentioned that the search for the word “pandemic” spiked by 1621% on Feb. 3rd. That was the same day the first COVID-19 patient was released from a Seattle hospital. By March, the search was up by an average of 4000%! On March 11th, WHO officially declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic. That same day the search for pandemic rose an astonishing 115,806%!
Here are some words that were runner ups for 2020.
Dictionary.com chose “Karen”, as well as quarantine, social distancing, conspiracy theory, doomscrolling, and superspreader to name a few.
Some of Merriam-Webster’s runner up words are coronavirus, defund, mamba (which was Kobe Bryant’s nickname), kraken, asymptomatic, and malarkey.
— Doug O’Brien
