‘Pandemic’ has been declared as the most popular word of 2020 by Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com.
Merriam-Webster’s editor, Peter Sokolowski, told The Associated Press, “This is probably not a big surprise. He said that often big news has a technical term associated with it and in this case, the term pandemic is not only technical but has become common.”
When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic on March 11, the term pandemic became the most searched for the site. Sokolowski said the term had been the most popular on the site throughout the year.
This is probably the word through which we will refer to this period in the future. The term began to be widely used worldwide since March when the Covid-19 outbreak was declared an epidemic, but it began trending on Merriam-Webster.com since early January when the outbreak on cruise ships Spread and killed the first American person.