If you were to choose a word that rose above most in 2020, which word would it be? Ding, ding, ding: Merriam-Webster on Monday announced âpandemicâ as its 2020 word of the year. âThat probably isnât a big shock,â Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster, told The Associated Press. âOften the big news story has a technical word thatâs associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. Itâs probably the word by which weâll refer to this period in the future,â he said. The word took on urgent specificity in March, when the coronavirus crisis was designated a pandemic, but it started to trend up on Merriam-Webster.com as early as January and again in February when the first U.S. deaths and outbreaks on cruise ships occurred. On March 11, when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, lookups on the site for pandemic spiked hugely. Site interest for the word has remained significantly high through the year, Sokolowski said. By huge, Sokolowski means searches for pandemic on March 11 were 115,806% higher than lookups experienced on the same date last year. Pandemic, with roots in Latin and Greek, is a combination of âpan,â for all, and âdemos,â for people or population. The latter is the same root of âdemocracy,â Sokolowski noted. The word pandemic dates to the mid-1600s, used broadly for âuniversalâ and more specifically to disease in a medical text in the 1660s, he said. That was after the plagues of the Middle Ages, Sokolowski said. He attributes the lookup traffic for pandemic not entirely to searchers who didnât know what it meant but also to those on the hunt for more detail, or for inspiration or comfort. âWe see that the word love is looked up around Valentineâs Day and the word cornucopia is looked up at Thanksgiving,â Sokolowski said. âWe see a word like surreal spiking when a moment of national tragedy or shock occurs. Itâs the idea of dictionaries being the beginning of putting your thoughts in order.â Merriam-Webster acted quickly in March to add and update entries on its site for words related to the pandemic. While âcoronavirusâ had been in the dictionary for decades, âCOVID-19â was coined in February. Thirty-four days later, Merriam-Webster had it up online, along with a couple dozen other entries that were revised to reflect the health emergency. âThatâs the shortest period of time weâve ever seen a word go from coinage to entry,â Sokolowski said. âThe word had this urgency.â Coronavirus was among runners up for word of the year as it jumped into the mainstream. Quarantine, asymptomatic, mamba, kraken, defund, antebellum, irregardless, icon, schadenfreude and malarkey were also runners up based on lookup spikes around specific events.
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