Words of the Year: 2021

The word-of-the-year announcements always fascinate me and give a real look into the zeitgeist and the ways different people and countries experienced the last year, and I'm sure it won't surprise most of you that most of last year's words were almost all about the pandemic and politics.

Vaccine

The clear winner for 2021 was "vaccine," which was the word of the year from Merriam-Webster, "The Economist," the Foundation for Emerging Spanish in Spain, and by vote from the readers of "The Portugal News." And Oxford Languages also chose a variation of the word, "vax."

Most of the online dictionaries use their lookup data or corpus data to choose—or at least narrow—their choices. 

For example, in a recent interview in the Zoom show called "That Word Chat" hosted by Mark Allen, who you may know on Twitter as  @EditorMark, Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster, said that for the entire year, "vaccine" was in the top 20 or 25 words people were looking up on their site, and that lookups for that word were 1048% higher than in 2019. He said that all the way back in May they were thinking this would likely be the word of the year because it was just so huge. 

And in fact, Merriam-Webster also updated their definition of "vaccine" in May because the new technology, the mRNA vaccines, meant that their definition was out of date because it had previously said that a vaccine was "a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease," but that's not how mRNA vaccines work. Since the press was talking about mRNA vaccines almost nonstop, Peter said there was an urgent need for more specificity in their definition. So it now has much more information, and they also changed the word "immunity" to "immune response," which now also has its own entry. 

Vax

"Vax" also jumped out from the data to the Oxford Languages people....

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