Language, the Pandemic, and the OED

As a major historical event, you would expect the pandemic to have an effect on language, and you'd be right. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has been tracking changes to the English language since the beginning of the pandemic and continues to do research and report on the subject. 

Oxford Languages’ lexical monitoring has shown that most of the key terms related to Covid-19 are not new inventions. Some words, such as immune, infection, symptom, vaccine, and virus, form part of the basic vocabulary of many languages; others like droplet, swab, and testing are common words with medical senses that gained special significance during the pandemic; and still others are highly technical scientific terms such as basic reproduction number, case fatality rate, community transmission, herd immunity, morbidity rate, and mortality rate, which refer to complex epidemiological concepts that are now being mentioned in news broadcasts and political speeches, as they are the basis of many government decisions with untold impact on millions of lives and livelihoods.

The discourse on Covid-19 is also characterized by words and phrases referring to government and individual actions aimed at containing the spread of the virus and mitigating its social and economic effects. As personal hygiene and the prevention of infection became the main preoccupation of society, words such as disinfectant, face mask, and hand sanitizer have dominated the conversation in most languages. As the avoidance of possibly dangerous physical contact became the order of the day, phrases such as flattening the curve and social distancing, previously unknown to people other than statisticians and epidemiologists, have become part of the daily vocabulary of many languages. The English word lockdown, referring to the set of measures that many countries have taken to contain the spread of the virus by severely limiting the movement of people outside the home, has been borrowed by languages like Dutch, Filipino, German, Italian, and Telugu, while  languages such as Catalan, French, Portuguese, and Spanish prefer their equivalent forms for confinement. Languages like Arabic, Chinese, and Zulu use corresponding expressions conveying closure.