World News – UK – Oxford English Dictionary names « Words of the Year »

The use of words related to social justice such as Black Lives Matter and Decolonise increased dramatically alongside a completely new lexicon around the Covid -19 pandemic

« I’ve never seen a year in a language like the one we just had, » says the President of Oxford Dictionaries

So much about 2020 was unprecedented and now the Oxford English Dictionary has followed suit, announcing for the first time that it was impossible to name a single “word of the year”. .

Oxford Dictionaries said it would add several words to the year-end ritual, the use of which as coronavirus dominated public conversation.

Among the words chosen this year were vacation, bushfire, WFH, lockdown, moon shot and new coins like Covid-19, Blursday and Covidiot.

The annual selection reflects « the ethos, mood or concerns » of the previous year, but this year the homage to linguistic change could not be summed up in a single word.

« I’ve never seen a year in a language like we just had. The Oxford team identified hundreds of significant new words and usages over the year, dozens of which would have been a blast for the word of the year at any other time, ”said Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries.

She said it was ironic that a year that left the world “speechless” had been filled with new words like no other.

The lexicographers have an extensive and constantly updated database with more than 11 billion words, which are referred to as corpus. The word of the year is selected from the corpus based on common usage and the study of « evidence-based data » to examine language developments over a year.

This year, the use of the word pandemic has increased by more than 57 since 2019. 000 percent increased. Coined in 1968, the word coronavirus was revived in 2020 after being limited to medical references only for decades.

Some examples could be traced back to certain events in the year that attracted worldwide interest. The word superspreader, which was coined back in the 1970s, became widely used in the White House in October after the infection broke out.

The use of social justice-related words like Black Lives Matter and Decolonise increased dramatically following massive protests following the murder of George Floyd in police custody in May.

Oxford Dictionaries said the use of pandemic-related words and phrases such as breakers, lockdowns, face masks, PPE, paramedics, delivery drivers and shelters has increased significantly since March.

As a result, new phrases have also appeared, such as mask up, anti-mask, anti-masker, and mask-shaming, while words related to workplace changes saw a more than 300 percent increase, including vacation. far and far. Mute and unmute has also seen an increase in usage due to the increase in online meetings.

After all, this year’s neologisms also reflected the harsh realities of 2020: Covidiot (an arc to shame someone who does not take the Covid protocol seriously), Blursday (which records the merging of hours, days and weeks ) and twindemic (two pandemics occurring together) and infodemic (excess of pandemic information leading to trouble), all of which are first occurring.

The use of social justice-related words like Black Lives Matter and Decolonise increased dramatically, along with an all-new lexicon around the Covid-19 pandemic

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Word of the Year, Oxford English Dictionary, Coronavirus, Language, Oxford Dictionaries