Pandemic is dictionary publisher Mirriam-Webster’s 2020 Word of the Year.
The term, meaning a disease that spreads over a wide area — nations, continents — is now well known to nearly all Americans, including many who likely had never seen or heard it before early February.
Mirriam-Webster bases its annual word-usage competition on the number of dictionary “lookups” found in its online data.
“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,” the publisher said in its announcement on Monday.
“What is most striking about this word is that it has remained high in our lookups” ever since the World Health Organization and news media began using it early last spring.
“Pandemic” stayed “near the top of our word list for the past ten months—even as searches for other related terms, such as coronavirus and COVID-19, have waned,” Mirriam-Webster says.
Other words in the list’s top 10 include “defund” (as in police), “schadenfreud” (enjoying another person’s misfortune), “quarantine” and “malarkey,” a word that President-elect Joe Biden uses, meaning nonsense.
