NEW YORK — The 2020 prize for Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year went to an obvious choice: pandemic.
The term had the most online dictionary lookups of any word, Merriam-Webster said on its website, after a year in which at least 1.4 million people globally have died from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Sometimes a single word defines an era, and it’s fitting that in this exceptional – and exceptionally difficult – year, a single word came immediately to the fore,” the dictionary publisher said.
Pandemic is defined as “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 popula…
Keep on reading: ‘Pandemic’ chosen as Word of the Year