The year 2020 had barely started before it ended, thanks to a pandemic.
Understandably, a vocabulary was fast to follow. Words like ‘quarantine’, ‘social distancing’, #isocraft became the norm this year… as did the ‘new normal’.
The Collins dictionary went with ‘lockdown’ as word of the year, the Australian National Dictionary Centre with ‘iso’ (aka isolation), Merriam-Webster’s chose ‘pandemic’, Macquarie broke the trend a little with ‘doomscrolling’, while the Oxford dictionary decided the year was so ‘unprecedented’ it couldn’t possibly rest on a single word this year, and published an entire list.
