2020’s word of the year is “pandemic” due to its frequent usage as declared by dictionary.com. When the World Health Organization (WHO) announced COVID 19 or novel coronavirus outbreak, a global pandemic last March 11, searches for the word spiked to 13,575% when compared to the search results for the word on the same day last year. It remained in the top 10 percent of all searches this year. Other words related to the pandemic were also at the top like “asymptomatic”, “quarantine”, “frontliner”, “lockdown”, and “coronavirus”.

Dictionary.com said that pandemic is the “defining context” of 2020. The virus already has 60 million victims and stole 1.5 million lives worldwide. They defined the word pandemic as “a disease prevalent throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world.”