Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year 2020

Quarantine has been named Word of the Year 2020 by Cambridge Dictionary, a website where editors use data from the website, blogs, and social media to identify and prioritize new additions. On the New Words Blog,  new additions are posted weekly for readers to cast their votes on whether they feel these words should be added. Surprisingly, "Quarantine" has defeated "lockdown" and "pandemic" to be  Word of the Year 2020 after data showed it to be one of the most highly searched for on the Cambridge Dictionary.

The Cambridge Dictionary editors have also tracked how people were using the word quarantine and discovered a new meaning : a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease.

Research shows the word is being used  to lockdown, particularly in the United States, to refer to a situation in which people stay home to avoid catching the disease.

This new  of quarantine has now been added to the Cambridge Dictionary, and marks a shift from the existing meanings, which relate to  a person or animal suspected of being infectious.

Neither corona virus nor COVID-19 appeared among the words that Cambridge Dictionary users searched for most this year. We believe this indicates that people have been  confident about what the virus is. Instead, users have been searching for words related to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic, as  not just by quarantine but by the two runners-up on the shortlist for Word of the Year: lockdown and pandemic itself. This interest in quarantine and other related  was reflected not only in our search statistics, but also in visits to this blog.

Cambridge Dictionary is the top dictionary website for English learning. The dictionary not only shows how words are used in real-world  but also gives out their definitions.