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Oxford English Dictionary couldn’t pick just one ‘word of the year’ for 2020
However, it has chosen words that reflect the mood and the preoccupations of 2020.
The year 2020 has truly been “unprecedented” - for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) which has used in the title of its report to name the “word of the year”. The OED said it has been impossible to name one winner in this “unprecedented” year.
“Though what was genuinely unprecedented this year was the hyper-speed at which the English-speaking world amassed a new collective vocabulary relating to the coronavirus, and how quickly it became, in many instances, a core part of the language,” the OED said in its report titled “Words of an Unprecedented Year”.
However, it has chosen words that reflect the mood and the preoccupations of 2020.
From superspreader to lockdown, words commonly used owing to the pandemic found a place in the list. The report said that usage of the word pandemic increased by 57,000 per cent last year while use of the word “coronavirus” was most frequent in April.
Other words which have seen a surge in use this year are terms related to technology as people are adapting to working from home. These include unmute, referring to people making themselves audible during online conferences, and Zoombombing, a variant on photobombing which was first recorded as a word in 2008, and refers to disturbing online calls on Zoom.
Also words to describe the social movements witnessed around the globe this year found a place in the list. Black Lives Matter, take a knee, cancel culture and virtue signalling all appeared on the curated list.
The list also included neologisms like Blursday, defined as when you have no idea what day of the week it is and covidiot, a person who disobeys guidelines designed to prevent the spread of Covid-19, and the informal term for the virus, rona.
Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, told The BBC, “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.”
In 2019, OED had named “climate emergency” as the word of the year and in 2018, the winner was “toxic”.