‘Pandemic’ named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year

Some of the runners-up were coronavirus, icon, kraken, and malarkey

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN)- A surprise to few, “Pandemic” has been named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.

Last year, the honor went to the word “They”.

Merriam-Webster says their Word of the Year is decided by data. “The word must have been a top lookup at Merriam-Webster.com in the past twelve months, and it must have seen a significant increase in lookups over the previous year.”

According to Merriam-Webster, Feb. 3 was the first surge in people looking up the word “pandemic”. This was the same day the first COVID-19 patient was released from a Seattle hospital. Searches for the word went up by 1,621%, in comparison to the same time the year before.

The largest spike in searches for “pandemic” happened on March 11: the day the World Health Organization officially announced that “COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.”

Merriam-Webster’s definition for the word is, “an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affects a significant proportion of the population.”