Pandemic, COVID, Anderhalvemetersamenleving: 2020 Words of the Year
It’s the Oscars of the language word: word-of-the-year data analysis and voting!
By
Mignon Fogarty
Mignon Fogarty
December 24, 2020
1-minute read
Episode #803
Listen
Pandemic, COVID, Anderhalvemetersamenleving: 2020 Words of the Year
We are currently experiencing playback issues on Safari. If you would like to listen to the audio, please use Google Chrome or Firefox.
The Quick And Dirty
- Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com both chose “pandemic” as the word of the year.
- Oxford Dictionaries declined to choose a word of the year.
- The American Dialect Society chose “COVID” as the word of the year (but “2020” was a close second).
Emily Brewster is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and a cohost of the Word Matters podcast.
In this interview, we talked about
- How Merriam-Webster chose “pandemic” as the word of the year.
- How other dictionaries choose words of the year (and how Oxford didn’t choose a word this year).
- How the American Dialect Society chooses its words of the year (with fun stories since Emily and Mignon both attended the vote).
- Words of the year in countries outside the U.S., such as “Megxit” and “anderhalvemetersamenleving.”
You can listen to the interview using the player at the top of this page, or you can read a complete rough transcript.