Oxford English Dictionary Skips 2020 ‘Word of the Year’

It turns out there's not a single word in the Oxford English Dictionary that can best describe and summarize the year 2020.

Traditionally, the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year is "a word or expression that has attracted a great deal of interest over the last 12 months." To give you perspective, The OED named "climate emergency" as word of the year in 2019, and "toxic" in 2018.

This year, the OED is breaking tradition, not being able to name one single word to call the word of the year for 2020.. "It quickly became apparent that 2020 is not a year that could neatly be accommodated in one single 'word of the year,'" the OED said, with the language adapting "rapidly and repeatedly" this year as we as country have grown through soooo much.

"Though what was genuinely unprecedented this year was the hyper-speed at which the English-speaking world amassed a new collective vocabulary relating to the coronavirus, and how quickly it became, in many instances, a core part of the language," the OED wrote up an report.

This is true. I was just discussing on air the other day how much new phrases and words have become a part of our everyday vocabulary this year that in years' past we wouldn't know what they meant. According to the report, new words came up in certain months. It's probably best just to create a list at this point summarizing OED's report on the 2020 word(s) of the year.

January - "bushfire" from when Australia suffered its worst fire season on record
February - "acquittal" when US President Donald Trump's impeachment trial ended.
March - terms related to coronavirus pandemic start to dominate our language including "Covid-19," a completely new word. It was first recorded on February 11.
April / May - "lockdown," "social distancing" and "reopening."
June - "Black Lives Matter" exploded, followed by "cancel culture" and "BIPOC," an abbreviation of "Black, indigenous and other people of color."
August - "Mail-in" and "Belarusian" referring to mail-in voting for the US election and the controversial reelection of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, respectively.
September - "Moonshot," the name the UK government gave to its mass coronavirus testing program
October - "net zero" and "superspreader." Net zero refers to Chinese President Xi Jinping's pledge that the country will be carbon neutral by 2060. The word superspreader dates back to the 1970s and saw a spike again after a cluster of Covid-19 cases at the White House.

LOOK: 50 photos of American life in 2020

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