Pandemic Language: How COVID-19 Changed English Forever

Every year, dictionary.com has a ‘word of the year,’ and in 2020, it’s no surprise that the word was ‘pandemic’. COVID-19 was an awful time for everyone, and it changed the world forever—socially, economically and linguistically.

Some new words and phrases were either newly created or reintroduced into society (like pandemic) that have since entered dictionaries and are now commonplace. Before we point out what they were, let’s look at why world events like COVID-19 generate new vocabulary.

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How World Events Accelerate Language Change

The English language is a constantly evolving and changing creature. As old words leave our general vocabulary, new ones take their place. When was the last time (if ever) that you used these now obsolete words: frutescent, apricity, twattle or eiflock? These are legitimate words, but they’ve been removed from many dictionaries as they’re not relevant or used anymore.

For centuries, world events have introduced new words into our vocabulary. New words are especially useful for anyone who wants to boost their vocabulary. Here are some examples of different periods and a sample of the words created during them:

• The Industrial Revolution: factory, mechanisation, urbanisation
• The Great Depression: breadline, Dust Bowl
• World War II: blitzkrieg, armistice
• The 1960s: flower power, groovy, vibe
• The Space Race: astronaut, spacewalk
• 9/11: war on terror, homeland security
• Climate Change Awareness: carbon footprint, greenhouse emissions
• The Digital Revolution: selfie, hashtag, blog

How is it that words gain momentum during these periods? Conversation. World events get people talking, and the more often a new word is used, the faster it becomes part of everyday vernacular. This process is known as lexical diffusion, when shared social experiences and digital communication reinforce new terms until they become normalised.

Amplified by the widespread use of social media, this process allows new words to enter our vocabulary with lightning speed.

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COVID-19 Introduces New Terms

The last time the word ‘pandemic’ was on everybody’s tongue was over 100 years ago during the Spanish Flu of 1918–1919. Even today, when you hear that word, your immediate thought is COVID-19.

Here are some words and phrases that we already used previously, but like pandemic, became mainstream again:

• Virus: not since the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s has this word been used to describe one specific disease, until now
• Quarantine: isolation to prevent spreading the virus
• Lockdown: government-mandated restrictions keeping people in their homes
• Vaccine: generally used for children and pets, it became the buzzword for COVID-19 prevention

And some new words and terms that we’ll forever link to the pandemic (until the next world event, anyway):

Doomscrolling

Being locked down, people had to rely on digital media for entertainment and connection. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was so much misinformation and conspiracy theories spread (primarily via social media) that the consumption of this was given its own name—doomscrolling.

The name comes from the act of scrolling through a Facebook or Instagram feed and seeing negative post after negative post. Unfortunately, doomscrolling ended up triggering widespread instances of anxiety and depression, leading to mental health issues for many.

Working from Home (WFH)

When people were locked down in their homes and couldn’t go to work, businesses had to accept the only logical solution—to allow people to WFH. For many office workers, this was as straightforward as being given access to their company servers from their personal laptops. Despite it being an adjustment for most, by the end of the pandemic, 88% of workers surveyed stated they’d prefer to continue to WFH going forward.

A concern for many business operators about the WFH option is how they could know whether their staff were actually working. Their biggest concerns were that their staff were streaming series on Netflix, spending the day in the kitchen baking cookies or gambling online through websites like casinos.com.

New Normal

Lifestyles were significantly altered during the pandemic. Remote work was the biggest cultural change, but there were other daily habits that needed to be adopted, some of them foreign to many people. These included mask-wearing, washing hands more frequently and using hand sanitiser before entering or leaving a room. Getting your temperature scanned before entering a store or an office was confronting at first, but after a brief period became accepted and adhered to. These changes in daily routines became accepted as the new way of life and were commonly referred to as ‘the new normal.’

Social Distancing

Even though the term was created in the 1960s to discuss personal space, during COVID-19, ‘social distancing’ became a daily catchphrase generally used to determine the physical space required between people. The thought process was that if an infected person coughed or sneezed, the distance was far enough apart for the virus not to make contact with the next person. Building elevator person limits were reduced to two to four people, and in some cases, available for solo travel only. Soon enough, glass and plastic partitions popped up from banks to cafes, allowing people to interact, but via a protective screen.

Elbow Bump

Humans are generally a tactile species, and the pandemic’s social distancing rules mean that hugging and even shaking hands were considered ‘at-risk behaviour’. The solution to avoid shaking hands was the elbow bump. Covered elbows were considered to have a minimal risk of spreading the disease.

Quarantine Bubble

One of the first signs that the lockdowns would be lifted was the allowance of people to gather in private in small groups. The theory was that if none of the group had tested positive, they could cohabitate and socialise exclusively, with minimal chance of getting the virus. The name for these groups of people was ‘quarantine bubble’.

Rona, Miss Rona, The Rona, The Vid

As the full name ‘the coronavirus’ contains six syllables, nicknames were given to make it shorter and easier to refer to. Some of the most popular were variations on the shortened ‘rona’ or simply ‘the vid’.