Merriam Webster’s top word of 2020 is what you expect

If you were to choose a word that became the most popular and deadly word of 2020 ,which word would it be? Well, it is not a shocker. Merriam-Webster announced “pandemic” as its 2020 word of the year.

“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.