Coronavirus and the OED

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an effect on our language, according to an ongoing analysis by the Oxford English Dictionary. To conduct the analysis, they use a database that "contains over 8 billion words of web-based news content from 2017 to the present day, and is updated each month."

Most of the words have, to different degrees, become more frequent, including the shortened forms corona and covid. (We’ve also seen evidence of the further shortenings rone and rona, mainly on social media.) The exceptions are the abbreviations of novel coronavirus – nCoV and 2019-nCoV – which peaked in February and have since become less common.

The most striking change has been the huge increase in frequency of the words coronavirus and COVID-19 themselves. Before 2020, coronavirus was relatively rare outside medical and scientific discourse, while COVID-19 was only coined in February; both now dominate global discourse.