New Delhi:
Vaccine was the word searched word this year and therefore, it became the Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2021. The other most looked up words include insurrection, perseverance, woke, nomad, infrastructure, cicada, murraya, cisgender, guardian, meta.
As per Merriam-Webster, the lookups and usage of the word vaccine increased 601 per cent year-over-year from 2020.
People started searching and mentioning vaccine often since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with much discussion of the funding, development, testing, and ultimate distribution of the vaccines occurring in 2020.
Search of the word rose a whopping 1,048 per cent compared to 2019.
Discussions of number of vaccines being manufactures, their efficacy, equitable distribution, vaccine mandates and even boosters rose the usages and searches of the word.
The Word of the Year is selected by Merriam-Webster on the basis of lookup data in the past 12 months, giving minute attention to spikes and year-on-year increases in searches or lookups.
Wondering what people found when they searched up the word vaccine on Merriam-Webster?
In May, Merriam-Webster revised its entry for the word after the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines trigger an immune response in a completely different and new manner.
It now reads:
1 : a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease: such as
a : an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated (see ATTENUATED sense 2) pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin)
b : a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)
2 : a preparation or immunotherapy that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against noninfectious substances, agents, or diseases.
The Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2020 selected the word “pandemic”.
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