‘Pandemic’ wins Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year

The 2020 Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is pandemic.

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

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“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 said.

Pandemic started to trend up on Merriam-Webster.com as early as January and again in February when first outbreaks and deaths in the US were reported on cruise ships.

It is defined 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,” according to Merriam-Webster.com.

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The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 as a global pandemic, resulting in a spike in pandemic searches on the site. Sokolowski said the site interest for the word remained high through the year.

Sokolowski added searches for “pandemic” on March 11 were 115,806% higher than on the same date in 2019.

Also read: DOST: Mass COVID-19 vaccination may start by June-July 2021

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‘Pandemic’ wins Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year

“Pandemic” is Latin and Greek in origin. It is a combination of “pan,” for all, and “demos,” for people or population. Sokolowski noted”demos” is the same root of “democracy.”

The word dates to the mid-1600s, after the plagues of the Middle Ages. It was used generally for “universal” and more specifically to disease in a medical text in the 1660s, Sokolowski said.

“We see that the word ‘love’ is looked up around Valentine’s Day, and the word ‘cornucopia’ is looked up at Thanksgiving,” Sokolowski said. “We see a word like ‘surreal’ spiking when a moment of national tragedy or shock occurs. It’s the idea of dictionaries being the beginning of putting your thoughts in order.”

Runners-up for 2020 Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year include “coronavirus,” “quarantine,” “asymptomatic,” “mamba,” “kraken,” “defund,” “antebellum,” “irregardless,” “icon,” “schadenfreude” and “malarkey.”

The Merriam-Webster site has about 40 million unique monthly visitors and around 100 million monthly page views.