Word of the Year 2020
By the end of the year, most dictionary company would review about the highest volume word searching in 2020 and try to reveal some very important things that have raised so much concern within the year. Here we have extracted some results from some popular dictionary companies.
An “unprecedented” year
At Dictionary.com, the task of choosing a single word to sum up 2020—a year roiled by a public health crisis, an economic downturn, racial injustice, climate disaster, political division, and rampant disinformation—was a challenging and humbling one.
One word kept running through the profound and manifold ways our lives have been upended—and the language so rapidly transformed—in this unprecedented year. That word is pandemic, the 2020 Word of the Year of Dictionary.com.
As most of us now know painfully well, a pandemic is defined as “a disease prevalent throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world.” And yet, the loss of life and livelihood caused by the COVID-19 pandemic defies definition.
With over 60 million confirmed cases (tally only according to the calculation as on the release date of the result of Word of the Year by Dictionary.com), the pandemic has claimed over one million lives across the globe and is still rising to new peaks. The pandemic has wreaked social and economic disruption on a historic scale and scope, globally impacting every sector of society. Despite its hardships, the pandemic inspired the best of our humanity: resilience and resourcefulness in the face of struggle.
Pandemic joined a cluster of other terms that users searched in massive numbers, whether to learn an unfamiliar word used during a government briefing or to process the swirl of media headlines: asymptomatic, CDC, coronavirus, furlough, nonessential, quarantine, and sanitizer, to spotlight a few. But of all these many queries, search volume for pandemic sustained the highest levels on site over the course of 2020, averaging a 1000% increase, month over month, relative to previous years.
After Dictionary.com named “pandemic” its Word of the Year, users of the online dictionary elected “unprecedented” as the People’s Choice 2020 Word of the Year.
“Unprecedented” beat out “pandemic” by a small margin, according to John Kelly, senior research editor at Dictionary.com, and is defined by the site as “without previous instance; never before known or experienced; unexampled or unparalleled.” Other user submissions included “dumpster fire,” “apocalyptic” and “pandemonium.”
“What’s particularly fascinating about unprecedented from a language perspective is the life cycle the word has had this year,” Kelly said in a statement. “The pandemic, the protests, the presidential election, extreme climate episodes—2020 sent us searching for a word that could do justice to the scale and pace of all this upheaval. We landed on unprecedented, and this was borne out both in lookups as well as in all the emails, ads, and headlines reminding us we’re living in unprecedented times.”
“Unprecedented became a cliché, and now the joke is that unprecedented needs to be sent into retirement,” he added. “And while overuse has sapped some of its power, unprecedented just won’t go away. How better to describe 2020? This shows just how much we humans hunger to find the right word for trying times, how sensitive we are to language use — and how not even a pandemic can put an end to that great, unifying pastime of complaining about our language pet peeves.”
As for Oxford Dictionaries, they couldn’t pick just one word of the year for an unprecedented 2020. So, Oxford decided to expand its word of the year to encompass several “Words of an Unprecedented Year”. Its words are chosen to reflect 2020’s “ethos, mood, or preoccupations”.
They include bushfires, Covid-19, WFH, lockdown, circuit-breaker, support bubbles, keyworkers, furlough, Black Lives Matter and moonshot. However, use of the word pandemic has increased by more than 57,000% this year.
Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, said: “I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had. The Oxford team was identifying hundreds of significant new words and usages as the year unfolded, dozens of which would have been a slam dunk for Word of the Year at any other time.
“It’s both unprecedented and a little ironic – in a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other.”
2020 is definitely an unprecedented year. To more than a hundred countries in the world, the pandemic is devastating till the light of vaccines. People can’t forget 2020 with this “unprecedented” incident. Facing lots of challenges, we may say human-being is undoubtedly one of the very smart and clever species in handling fear and taking any necessary measures to curb the coronavirus pandemic by hook or by crook. People in all classes have woken up and made a new normal life with changes. COVID will fade out soon. Tomorrow will be a brighter day.