For the first time, two US dictionary companies on Monday declared the same word their word of the year: "pandemic".

 

本周一（11月30日），两家美国词典公司宣布了同一个年度词汇"大流行病"，这还是有史以来首次。

 

The challenges of 2020, Oxford¹ Languages said, "brought a new immediacy and urgency to the role of the lexicographer². In almost real-time, lexicographers were able to monitor and analyze³ seismic⁴ shifts in language data and precipitous frequency rises in new coinages".

 

Because the coronavirus pandemic brought on gargantuan⁵ language changes, the report said, "2020 is a year which cannot be neatly⁶ accommodated in one single ‘word of the year'."

 

Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com disagreed, though both also noted⁷ enormous shifts toward other related words.

 

Pandemic "probably isn't a big shock", said Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for 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."

 

John Kelly, senior research editor at Dictionary.com, said searches for "pandemic" spiked⁹ more than 13,500% on 11 March, the day the World Health Organization declared an outbreak of the novel coronavirus a global health emergency.

 

The spike⁸, he said, was "massive, but even more telling is how high [pandemic] has sustained significant search volumes throughout the entire year".

 

Month over month, lookups for pandemic were up more than 1,000%. For about half the year, the word was in the top 10% of all lookups on Dictionary.com, Kelly said.

 

At Merriam-Webster.com, searches for "pandemic" on 11 March were 115,806% higher than spikes¹⁰ experienced on the same date last year, Sokolowski said.

 

Pandemic, with roots in Latin and Greek, is a combination of "pan", for all, and "demos", for people or population, Sokolowski said, adding that the latter is also the root of "democracy".

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