Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com choose same 'word of the year': Pandemic

At least two Dictionary companies declared a similar ‘top’ word as their 2020 word of the year for the first time: Pandemic. Experts at Oxford English Dictionary noted that the word gained popularity and entered mainstream usage due to the COVID-19 crisis this year. Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com chose ‘pandemic’ specifically as it started to trend after WHO declared a global health emergency citing, that an epidemic had ‘swelled’ to a pandemic crisis. The search volume for pandemic sustained the highest levels on-site over the course of 2020, dictionary.com informed in a release. Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster.com told AP that the word picked up when the first US COVID-19 fatality was recorded and a cluster outbreak broke out on a cruise liner. 

“That probably isn’t a shock,” Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster, told Associated Press.

“Often the big news story has a technical word that’s associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. It’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period in the future,” he added.

According to Merriam-Webster, the searches for the word were 115,806 percent higher by March 11, and on dictionary.com, the word pandemic skyrocketed by 13,575 percent in 2020. “On the day, when COVID-19 had then only taken 4,291 lives around the world,” Dictionary informed. It added that the search volume for the word averaged a 1000 percent increase compared to 2019. “It remained in the top 10% of all lookups for much of the year since,” the company said in a release, adding that pandemic is a "consequential word for a consequential year.”

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[Photo the word pandemic is displayed in a dictionary in Washington. Merriam-Webster on Monday announced “pandemic” as its 2020 word of the year. Credit: AP Photo/Jenny Kane]

Keyword 'trend'

According to Sokolowski, the lookup traffic for pandemic spiked not entirely due to the searchers but people were looking at information related to the keyword all around the year as 2020 was about economic meltdown due to the pandemic, protocols and government advisory all related to the pandemic, and disinformation and other challenges surrounding the word. “Our choice was overwhelmingly clear,” Dictionary said. “From our perspective as documenters of the English language, one word kept running through the profound and manifold ways our lives have been upended.”

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