The publishers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary have announced that their Word of the Year for 2020 is "pandemic." The word of the year is often determined by how many people look up the word in the online dictionary compared to previous years, which reveals what is significant about the year. They noticed the first big spike for "pandemic" on February 3rd, although lookups had increased earlier in 2020.
On March 11th, the World Health Organization officially declared “that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic,” and this is the day that pandemic saw the single largest spike in dictionary traffic in 2020, showing an increase of 115,806% over lookups on that day in 2019. What is most striking about this word is that it has remained high in our lookups ever since, staying near the top of our word list for the past ten months—even as searches for other related terms, such as coronavirus and COVID-19, have waned.
The dictionary site also reveals to us the eleven next most-looked-up words of 2020, with context for each, and none of them will surprise you.