Zoombombing, superspreader, WFH: Covid makes Oxford Dictionary expand word of year

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) often names a single phrase that defines a 12 months, however such has been the affect of the Covid-19 pandemic that 2020 can’t be neatly accommodated in a single phrase – it has recognized ‘words of an unprecedented year’.

They embody unmute, WFH, lockdown, superspreader, Zoombombing (on the strains of photobombing), remotely, pandemic, on the frontline, mask-shaming, social distancing, bodily distancing, circuit-breaker, assist bubbles, keyworkers, furlough’.

OED stated: “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.”

“Even back in April we noted that the frequency of the word coronavirus had exceeded one of the most frequently used nouns in the English language, time, as detected by our corpus data. 2020 brought a new immediacy and urgency to the role of the lexicographer”.

“In almost real-time, lexicographers were able to monitor and analyse seismic shifts in language data and precipitous frequency rises in new coinages”, it stated on Monday.

OED divided the phrases in response to the themes: the language of Covid-19, know-how and distant working, the atmosphere, social actions and social media, and politics and economics.

It stated that from the sobering discourse of pandemics and politics, to the light-hearted neologisms which have emerged in occasions of darkness, language is the frequent thread connecting these shared experiences throughout the globe.

Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, stated: “I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had. The Oxford team was identifying hundreds of significant new words and usages as the year unfolded, dozens of which would have been a slam dunk for Word of the Year at any other time”.

“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.”