AKIPRESS.COM - Merriam-Webster on Monday announced “pandemic” as its 2020 word of the year.  “That probably isn’t a big shock,” said Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster.

“Often the big news story has a technical word that’s associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. It’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period in the future,” he said.

The word took on urgent specificity in March, when the coronavirus crisis was designated a pandemic, but it started to trend up on Merriam-Webster.com as early January and again in February when the first U.S. deaths and outbreaks on cruise ships occurred.

On March 11, when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, searches on the site for “pandemic” spiked hugely. Site interest for the word has remained significantly high through the year, Sokolowski said.

By huge, Sokolowski means searches for “pandemic” on March 11 were 115,806% higher than look-ups experienced on the same date last year.

Pandemic, with roots in Latin and Greek, is a combination of “pan,” for all, and “demos,” for people or population. The latter is the same root of “democracy,” Sokolowski noted. The word pandemic dates to the mid-1600s, used broadly for “universal” and more specifically to disease in a medical text in the 1660s, he said.

That was after the plagues of the Middle Ages, Sokolowski said.

He attributes the traffic for pandemic not entirely to searchers who didn’t know what it meant but also to those on the hunt for more detail, or for inspiration or comfort. 

“Coronavirus” was among runners-up for word of the year as it jumped into the mainstream. “Quarantine,” “asymptomatic,” “mamba,” “kraken,” “defund,” “antebellum,” “irregardless,” “icon,” “schadenfreude” and “malarkey” were also runners-up based on search spikes around specific events. 

The Merriam-Webster site has about 40 million unique monthly users and about 100 million monthly page views.