From a story by Jessica M. Goldstein in the Washington Post Magazine titled “For many people, the search for meaning in a pandemic starts with the dictionary”:
When the pandemic came, we panic-shopped for toilet paper and swept the grocery store shelves. . . .And we asked ourselves some variation on the same question: What does this mean?
When we’re searching for meaning, we know where to go: the dictionary.
The word nerds at Merriam-Webster have been tracking our lookups since the dictionary went digital in 1996. “No one has looked at dictionary data longer than me,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor at large, told me. . . .
The top definition searches from March 16 to 19, in order, after “covid-19”: “corona,” “pandemic,” “social distancing,” “self-quarantine,” “lockdown,” “furlough,” “socialism,” “novel,” “draconian,” “adrenochrome” (which, Sokolowski cautioned, is from a conspiracy theory “that has nothing to do with the actual science”), “community spread,” “self-isolation” and “trust.”. . .
After “trust” came “apocalypse,” then “epidemic,” then “asymptomatic” and then “esprit de corps,” which President Trump used during a press briefing. . . .
Words like “apocalypse,” “stress” and “unprecedented” are all on the rise, as is one of Sokolowski’s favorites: “surreal.”
For Merriam-Webster, “surreal” “has a special place in our data, because it was the number one word looked up after 9/11,” Sokolowski told me. . . .
“Words matter,” he told me. “And when people are checking themselves, I think that’s a good sign. It shows that people are thinking. Curiosity is the only thing we can accurately measure. And curiosity, I think, is the opposite of ignorance.”
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