Merriam-Webster has released its list of the most looked-up words of 2020, and it’s no surprise that words related to virus and disease figure prominently.
Peter Sokolowski and Emily Brewster, who also co-host the NEPM-produced podcast “Word Matters,” are editors at the Springfield, Massachusetts-based dictionary.
They said that although several words are connected to COVID-19, that specific word is too new to qualify for this year's list.
Brewster: Our top word of the year is pandemic, because interest in that word never dropped off. That word was looked up in vast quantities … throughout the year, starting in March. It really never fell back.
Sokolowski: And with the others, we saw them spike when the news hit. So March 19 was the big spike for coronavirus and March 20 — the next day — for quarantine. And that kind of tells a little narrative right there. You know, we identify the disease and then we receive kind of a … prescription of behavior.
Brewster: Yes, and then asymptomatic was looked up in increased numbers when people were trying to figure out the details of how this disease presents.
Kari Njiiri, NEPM: Schadenfreude. How did this word make the list?
Sokolowski: Schadenfreude had a big spike when it was announced that President Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. And schadenfreude is a German word. It means "enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others." It's one of these compound German words. Shaden means damage and freude means joy.
Brewster: The announcement of the president's illness was widely met with wishes for his full recovery. There was still this sense that schadenfreude was something people were experiencing because the administration had not previously been taking the virus very seriously. And so, to see people who shun masks, then come down with a virus, schadenfreude seemed to be the word that came to many people's minds.
In addition to — and I guess in some ways connected to — the pandemic, the U.S. saw a wave of racial justice protests sparked by the most recent round of killings by police of Black men and women. Your list contains the word defund, as in "defund the police." Why do you think people were confused about that definition?
Brewster: Oh, I think the entire nation was wondering exactly who meant what when they used that term. There are activists on the record as saying, "We mean exactly what it sounds like. We mean to remove, withdraw funding from police." But then there were others who are saying, another idea would reallocate some funding to other services.
Another word on the list related to protests for racial justice is antebellum. This is a word that has connotations of the South and slavery, and it led to a fight in the music industry and competing lawsuits, right?
Sokolowski: I mean, antebellum, of course, in Latin just means "before the war." But in American English, it really specifically means "before the American Civil War." So it does refer to that period and draws immediate thoughts of especially the South, before the Civil War.
But of course, there was a music group called Lady Antebellum that wanted to disassociate itself from that idea and changed its name to Lady A, but there was another group that was called —
There was a woman named Lady A.
Sokolowski: Yeah, that's right. So there was a huge amount of attention paid to this change, which then led to possible professional confusion.
Brewster: And in this case, the word it means, you know, "existing before the American Civil War," when the most prominent and disturbing feature of life was the institution of slavery. And so, Lady Antebellum wanted to stop evoking that word Antebellum, [which] evokes this time when this institution was still approved by the government, legally anyway. Then also the word was used in the title of a movie that wanted to look directly at that institution that existed prior to the Civil War.
Sokolowski: You know, entertainment often drives [dictionary web] traffic. It's not just politics. It's not just the pandemic. It can be Hollywood. It can be sports.
I can see my mother and other teachers hearing this, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes over this word that made the list: irregardless.
Brewster: We're sorry. (laughter) Irregardless was looked up in the dictionary in great numbers this year, in part because a number of people, including actor Jamie Lee Curtis, had the mistaken idea that the word had been newly entered to the merriam-webster.com dictionary. We have defined the word irregardless — we define it as "regardless" — since 1934. We label it nonstandard. We recommend that people use regardless instead because the word is much despised. But the question about whether or not irregardless is a word must be answered in the affirmative. It is a word. It is a word that has been in use for a long time.
We’ll be sure to pass these complaints on to the editors of our 1934 edition.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) July 2, 2020
Sokolowski: And the descriptive mission of the dictionary is more scientific than most people think. In other words, if this word appears in print frequently — which it has over the decades — it is incumbent upon us, it is our job to report that fact, that linguistic fact. It's not the job of the dictionary to determine which words exist and which words don't exist. We report on all the words.
Other words on Merriam-Webster's 2020 list include: malarkey, mamba, Kraken and iconic.
