You can easily guess Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year.
After months of quarantine, social distancing, and quarreling with fellow mask-wearing shoppers over the last pack of toilet paper at the supermarket (we all saw it!), we canât imagine another word thatâs become more synonymous with 2020 than âpandemic.â
Merriam-Webster agrees, and it made the official declaration Monday morning (November 30).
âThat probably isnât a big shock,â Merriam-Websterâs Editor at Large, Peter Sokolowski, told The Associated Press. âOften the big news story has a technical word thatâs associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. Itâs probably the word by which weâll refer to this period in the future.â
Unsurprisingly, âcoronavirusâ was the second runner-up for Word of the Year, with words like âquarantineâ and âasymptomaticâ trailing closely behind.
In Merriam-Websterâs definition, pandemic means: âoccurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population.â With Latin and Greek origins, the word combines âpan,â for all, and âdemos,â for people or population.
The term reached global notoriety in March when the coronavirus outbreak touched down in the United States and has continued to wreak both health- and economic-related havoc on the nation. Today, 13.4 million cases of coronavirus and 267,000 deaths linked to the novel disease have been reported in the U.S. alone.
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