Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.
. That kind of search jump for a new entry had never happened before. It indicated that people were looking up the word constantly, and now Merriam had something for them to find, which was good for the dictionary’s editorial credibility and its page views. On the company’s Slack channel, associate life sciences editor Chris Connor wrote, “clearly this information was in demand.”
That wasn’t surprising. “When everything’s in flux—news is coming at you from everywhere, and you aren’t sure what’s accurate and what’s not—people tend to want an objective authority to turn to,” Kory Stamper, a former editor at Merriam-Webster and author of, told me. “We already think of dictionaries as authorities, so it’s not all that surprising that, when people want clear information about something, they turn to them.
The pandemic has been long-lasting, far-reaching, and constantly shifting—and has involved lots of unfamiliar, nuanced, and, depending on the source, conflicting language. “Individual words and phrases are especially fraught right now,” Stamper said, “and because the responses are so local, the words we use to talk about the pandemic also end up being local.
Merriam’s main American competitor, Dictionary.com, has posted articles on distinctions in meaning that, based on its search lookups, appear to be confusing readers:
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