“Although a lot of the words we’re using just now and a lot of the terminology is actually older, a lot of it seems fairly new. The others are pre-existing terms that have gained new resonance at a time when many people are subject to a ‘stay-at-home order’ (US), ‘movement control order’ (Malaysia) or ‘enhanced community quarantine’ (Philippines). But McPherson notes that the only actual new word added to the dictionary is ‘Covid-19’.
But in April, the figures for both ‘Covid-19’ and ‘coronavirus’ had skyrocketed to about 1,750 per million tokens (suggesting that the two terms are now being used at roughly the same frequency).Īll of the terms added to the OED in April, in an unscheduled update, were related to the pandemic in some way, including ‘infodemic’ and ‘elbow bump’. The term ‘Covid-19’ was only coined in February, when the WHO announced the official name of the virus. According to Fiona McPherson, the senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), back in December ‘coronavirus’ appeared only 0.03 times per million tokens (tokens are the smallest units of language collected and tracked in the OED corpus). Like everyone else, lexicologists are scrambling to keep up with the changes the pandemic has wrought. And, of course, there are abbreviations, like the ubiquitous ‘WFH’ and the life-saving ‘PPE’. Many use ‘corona’ as a prefix, whether Polish speakers convert ‘coronavirus’ into a verb or English speakers wonder how ‘coronababies’ (the children born or conceived during the pandemic) will fare. Many of the newly popular terms relate to the socially distanced nature of human contact these days, such as ‘virtual happy hour’, ‘covideo party’ and ‘quarantine and chill’.
Lawson attributes this to multiple factors: the dizzying pace at which the virus has spread, its dominance in the media and global interconnectivity at a time when social media and remote contact are so important. While Brexit may be the closest parallel, the speed of the linguistic change we’re seeing with Covid-19 is unprecedented, says Robert Lawson, a sociolinguist at Birmingham City University. More recently, Brexit led to a flowering of new words, including the inevitable ‘Bremain’ and ‘Bregret’, and a repurposing of existing words, such as ‘backstop’.
George Eliot, the 19th Century writer who was famously frustrated by rigid gender and lifestyle norms, is credited with the first recorded use of the word ‘frustrating’. Throughout history, challenging circumstances have given rise to new ways of expressing those challenges.
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