“That probably isn’t a big shock,” said Peter Sokolowski, editor at Merriam-Webster.

“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.

The word suddenly got the spotlight in March, when the coronavirus crisis was designated a pandemic. But it started to trend up on Merriam-Webster.com as early January and again in February when the first US deaths and outbreaks on cruise ships occurred.

When the World Health Organisation declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic on March 11, search on the site for pandemic spiked hugely and it remained high through the year.
Look-ups for pandemic on March 11 were 115,806 percent higher than lookups experienced on the same date last year.

The reason for the increase in searches is not entirely because of ignorance but to get more details, or for inspiration or comfort.

The word pandemic originated from Latin and Greek. Pan means for all and demos, for people and population.

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.

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

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Merriam- Webster has shared the news on their website, “It has come to our attention lately that there is a small and polite group of people who are not overly fond of the word irregardless.” Reasoning their choice, they further stated, “The reason we, and these dictionaries above, define irregardless is very simple: it meets our criteria for inclusion. This word has been used by a large number of people (millions) for a long time (over two hundred years) with a specific and identifiable meaning (“regardless”).”

Going on to define the word, they stated, “We define irregardless, even though this act hurts the feelings of many. Why would a dictionary do such a thing? Do we enjoy causing pain? Have we abdicated our role as arbiter of all that is good and pure in the English language? These are all excellent questions (well, these are all questions), and you might ask them of some of these other fine dictionaries, all of whom also appear to enjoy causing pain through the defining of tawdry words.”

Along with this, it has also added 535 new words this year such as thirsty signifying strong desire for attention and zonkey which is a hybrid of zebra and monkey.

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