NORTHAMPTON — Every year, Merriam-Webster publishes a list of top words from the year. The top of this year’s list was easy to determine, said Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at the Springfield-based dictionary company and an Easthampton resident.
“It was crystal clear,” he said. The dictionary’s 2020 word of the year: pandemic. “The fact with pandemic was it had that massive spike in March,” he said of the number of searches of the word, “and stayed high all year long.”
On March 11 — the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic — “pandemic” was looked up 115,806% more times than the same day in 2019, according to Merriam-Webster’s website.
Other words that made the list: coronavirus, defund, mamba, kraken, quarantine, antebellum, schadenfreude, asymptomatic, irregardless, icon and malarkey.
Decisions are based on statistics, and Merriam-Webster looks at the frequency with which words are looked up and compare those numbers to the previous year, Sokolowski explained. They also look for words that say something about the year because some words, such as “democracy” or “socialism,” are looked up frequently every year, he said.
It’s obvious why a word like “quarantine” made the list this year, but the high ranking of other words, like “kraken,” may be more of a surprise to some.
Merriam-Webster’s list online provides detailed explanations about what drove the words to prominence this year. Searches for “kraken,” for example, spiked after a new hockey team, the Seattle Kraken, was announced, said Emily Brewster, a Merriam-Webster senior editor who lives in Greenfield.
“We can see the dictionary lookups as a reaction,” she said. In general, “we can’t say definitively that every single person looked a word up for the same reason.” But after they see a large number of searches after a particularly prominent article or when a word is trending on Twitter, “then it’s pretty safe to guess that this is what is driving these lookups.”
In early October, news broke that President Donald Trump had COVID-19, and searches of the word “schadenfreude” soared. The dictionary defines the German word as “enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others” and points to headlines such as one in USA Today that read “President Donald Trump’s coronavirus infection draws international sympathy and a degree of schadenfreude” as a reason for the increase.
Searches for “irregardless” increased by 464% in July “when actress Jamie Lee Curtis asserted on Twitter that we had just entered the word,” and other celebrities followed, reads Merriam-Webster’s website. That was not accurate — the word has been in the Merriam-Webster dictionary since 1934.
The word is “despised,” Brewster said, so much so the dictionary recommends not using it. Some complain it’s not logical, as it has the same meaning as “regardless,” Brewster said.
“While some will deem the word’s presence in this list as further evidence of how truly odious the year was,” Merriam-Webster’s website page about the list reads, “we in the dictionary business know that the word qualified for inclusion here because people care about language, and that’s worth celebrating.”
The word became national news after the tweets — Sokolowski said he ended up speaking to national news outlets about it. “What I like about that is it proves how much people care about language and words,” he said.
Merriam-Webster has been doing the words-of-the-year list for well over a decade. “It’s like an annual report for investors except for it’s about how the language has been used in the past 12 months,” Sokolowski said. Last year, the top word was “they,” and the year before that, it was “justice.”
This year, new words related to the pandemic were also added to the dictionary in an unscheduled update — usually, updates to the dictionary are regularly at specific times. “COVID-19,” for example, was one of those words. “It’s the fastest term to go from coinage to dictionary,” Brewster said. Other words included “social distancing,” and a new definition was added to “social distance,” whose first definition is “the degree of acceptance or rejection of social interaction between individuals and especially those belonging to different social groups … ”
“It’s sort of interesting to see how words take a hard right turn,” Sokolowski said. “No one will ever think about that original meaning of social distance.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.