Famed dictionary brand Merriam-Webster has announced the 2020 Word of the Year – an annual tradition based on the events of the year and popularity of certain words. This year, the word of the year is “pandemic” due to the world’s Coronavirus health crisis.
“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 as we examined the data that determines what our Word of the Year will be,” the dictionary company explained. “The first big spike in dictionary lookups for pandemic took place on February 3rd, the same day that the first COVID-19 patient in the U.S. was released from a Seattle hospital. That day, pandemic was looked up 1,621% more than it had been a year previous, but close inspection of the dictionary data shows that searches for the word had begun to tick up consistently starting on January 20th, the date of the first positive case in the U.S.”
The official definition of “pandemic” is “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.”
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