‘Vaccine’ is the word of the year in the Merriam-Webster dictionary

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary has just announced its ‘Word of the Year’. For some it is a symbol of hope and health. For others, it is the representation of a politicized issue. As everyone can agree, the word is everywhere and it’s controversial.

“Vaccine” is the Merriam-Webster word of the year. The word was selected based on search data, notable spikes and yearly increases in searches.

“This is a word that has two parallel but intersecting histories: one is a medical history and the other is a political or cultural history,” said Peter Sokolowski, general editor of Merriam-Webster.

The choice is made after “pandemic” was chosen in 2020, a word that served as the basis for the main surveys on the site and reformulated the everyday language, according to the company. The Oxford English Dictionary selected “vax” as the word of the year.

The “vaccine” was chosen, according to Merriam-Webster, as a promising medical solution that has become a major source of political division. New research into vaccines led the company to revise and expand its entry to “vaccine” in May.

An addition to “immune response”, in which cells behave as if a disease were present to train the body to fight it, was added separate from “immunity”.

“The ‘messenger RNA vaccine’ was new to me, I had never heard of it, and unless you were a research scientist, probably not either,” Sokolowski told CNN. “Before, the dictionary didn’t even include a definition.”

On the website, searches for “vaccine” increased by 601% in 2020, especially at the end of the year, when the first dose was applied in the United States, in December.

There was a 1,048% increase in website searches this year compared to 2019. In August, “vaccine” searches increased by 535% due to wide distribution in parts of the world and leading stories about policy, pass rates and vaccination. In August, the Pfizer vaccine received full FDA approval.

It was also the time when New York and California instituted vaccine mandates for healthcare professionals, as well as national booster immunization announcements to the general public, which led to debates about inequities in immunization distribution.

And research remained stable until late fall, especially with discussions about the Ômicron variant and the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing it.

Sokolowski believes that people will continue to search for the word for years to come, as the term “vaccine” becomes a more normal feature of daily life.

(Text translated, read original in English here)