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IT’S the year of Covid-19 so it comes as no surprise that “pandemic” is indeed the declared Word of the Year (WOTY) by two esteemed dictionary publishers.
This is the annual task of English language documenters at Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster: To find that one word that had the greatest impact on the English-speaking world in a given year.
As expected, 2020 saw a slew of old and new buzzwords mostly related to you-know-what.
There have been so many that the Oxford chaps couldn’t pick just one. Instead, they came out with an unprecedented 48 words because this has been “a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word”.