2020 Words of the Year

By edhat staff

Esteemed dictionaries have revealed their top words of the year for 2020. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a good portion of these words are COVID-19 related.

Pandemic

Both Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2020 is pandemic. Merriam-Webster defines 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.

In Greek pan means “all” or “every,” and dēmos means “people”; its literal meaning is “of all the people.” The related word epidemic comes from roots that mean “on or upon the people.” The two words are used in ways that overlap, but in general usage a pandemic is an epidemic that has escalated to affect a large area and population, Merriam-Webster states.

It was February 3 when the first big spike in dictionary lookups took place on Merriam-Webster’s website, the same day the first COVID-19 patient in the U.S. was released from a Seattle hospital. Pandemic was looked up 1,621% more than it had been a year previous. The searches grew and by early March, the word was being looked up an average of 4,000% over 2019 levels. 

Unprecedented

The readers of Dictionary.com rebelled from the website’s selection of “pandemic” and instead chose “unprecedented” as the 2020 people’s choice word of the year.

It’s defined as “without previous instance; never before known or experienced; unexampled or unparalleled.”

Almost every media outlet and news anchor is guilty of using the word “unprecedented” at least a handful of times a week. Whether its’ referring to the coronavirus or something the President does or says, there have been a lot of unprecedented events this year.

Users also submitted “dumpster fire,” “apocalyptic” and “pandemonium” as top words of the year.

Quarantine

Cambridge Dictionary announced their Word of the Year for 2020 as quarantine, as well as an additional change to the definition. According to their data, it was one of the most searched words in their dictionary this year.

Quarantine was solely defined as “a specific period of time in which a person or animal that has a disease, or may have one, must stay or be kept away from others in order to prevent the spread of the disease.”

Their research showed the word was being used synonymously with lockdown, particularly in the United States, to refer to a situation in which people stay home to avoid catching the disease.This new sense of quarantine has now been added to the Cambridge Dictionary, and marks a shift from the existing meanings, which relate to containing a person or animal suspected of being contagious.

A secondary definition now includes: a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease.

Oxford Dictionary Chooses Multiple Words

Oxford Dictionary went rogue this year and published a collection of the year’s top words in a paper titled, “2020: Words of an Unprecedented Year.”

The dictionary stated that 2020 could not be neatly summed up in a single word and their team of expert lexicographers captured and analyzed this lexical data every step of the way. 

Some of the top words and phrases throughout the globe were “shelter in place” for the United States; “lockdown” for the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia; and “circuit breaker” for the United Kingdom and Singapore.

The dictionary organized top searches by categories and broke down the most prominent words from there. For example, the coronavirus category included words such as pandemic, covid-19, social distancing, lockdown, and masks.

Other categories included technology and working from home, politics, social justice, and the environment. 

Some of their top words throughout the year included:  bushfire, impeachment, coronavirus, lockdown, social distancing, Black Lives Matter, cancel culture, mail-in, and superspreader.