From ‘Doomscrolling’ To ‘Racialization,’ New Dictionary.com Words Encapsulate 2020

Dictionary.com announced on Thursday that it had updated 7,600 entries in its online database, adding 450 new words along with 94 new definitions of existing words ― many of which were representative of a chaotic 2020 defined by a global pandemic and racial injustice.

John Kelly, Dictionary.com’s managing editor, said in a press release that the coronavirus had transformed the English language and pointed out that one of the new entries was “the name of an application that, for so many of us, became synonymous with life during COVID-19: Zoom.”

Examples of other new terms that gained mainstream usage during the pandemic include “flatten the curve,” “superspreader” and “doomscrolling” ― a common activity for many during lockdown that is formally defined as “the practice of obsessively checking online news for updates, especially on social media feeds, with the expectation that the news will be bad.”

“Our update also reflects how our society is reckoning with racism, including in language,” Kelly added. “We have added such terms as ‘BIPOC,’ ‘Critical Race Theory,’ and ‘overpolice,’ which have risen to the top of the national discourse on social justice.”

Other race-related updates to the site include words such as “racialization” (“an act or instance of viewing and interacting with people from a racist perspective”), as well as several words stemming from African American Vernacular English, such as “finna” (a “variant of ‘fixing to,’ a phrase commonly used in Southern U.S. dialects to mark the immediate future while indicating preparation or planning already in progress”).

Dictionary.com is not the only outlet to track linguistic changes during a tumultuous year. In Germany, a list compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language revealed more than 1,200 words that had been added to the German language during 2020, including “CoronaFußgruß,” which translates to “foot greeting” and refers to the awkward alternative to handshakes that many adopted during the onset of the pandemic.