A person prepares to get a Pfizer COVID vaccine at a clinic in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2021. Merriam-Webster chose “vaccine” as the word of the year, citing the consistently increasing number of searches.
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A person prepares to get a Pfizer COVID vaccine at a clinic in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2021. Merriam-Webster chose “vaccine” as the word of the year, citing the consistently increasing number of searches.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
In 2020, the Merriam-Webster dictionary chose “pandemic” as word of the year.
This year, like some 59% of Americans are fully immunized, it goes with “vaccination”.
The publishing company notes that the word has a special meaning both as a medical term and as a vehicle for ideological conflict.
It says in Announcement on Monday. “But it’s also at the heart of debates about individual choice, political parties, professional regulations, school safety, health care inequality, and more.”
Search has increased by more than 600% compared to last year
Word of the year is determined by data, as Merriam-Webster has explained in the past. This must have been the top search on Merriam-Webster.com over the past 12 months, and it must have grown significantly year-over-year.
That was certainly the case with this year’s “vaccines”. The dictionary said the number of searches for this word increased by 601% year-on-year and 1,048 percent year-on-year.
It notes that interest in the word has spiked since the start of the pandemic, with people seeking out and discussing the funding, development and distribution of vaccines before they are actually available at pharmacies.
And searches for “vaccination” jumped 535% in August, which Merriam-Webster said was due to “discussions about policy, approvals, and vaccination rates – not the vaccine itself – that went wrong.” put everyone in the dictionary.”
For context: This was a time when New York and California Mandatory vaccines for healthcare workers, Food and Drug Administration fully approved with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the Biden administration announced plans for booster shots to the US public, among other titles.
“This higher rate of new searches since August has remained steady throughout late fall, not only indicating a very high level of interest in Vaccine, but a number that’s starting to be high and growing throughout 2021,” Merriam-Webster added.
A breakthrough vaccine requires a revised definition
And what do people find when they search for that word? Merriam-Webster says a new vaccine inherits a new and improved definition.
The company revised the entry for the word in May, because the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine triggers the immune response in a whole new way.
The definition used to be: “Preparation of a killed microorganism, live attenuated organism or fully virulent organism used to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease body.” Now it reads:
1: a preparation used (as an injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a particular infectious agent or disease: such as
a: antigenic preparation of a commonly inactivated or attenuated pathogen (see ATTENUATED Opinion 2) (such as bacteria or virus) or one of its components or products ( such as proteins or toxins)
b: preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthetic messenger RNA) that is used by the body’s cells to make antigens (such as a mutated viral protein fragment)
The Dictionary already has several contenders running for Word of the Year, rounding the list to 10. Other contenders include insurgency, persistence, wake-up, infrastructure, Murray, Transgender and Meta. But they cannot compete with “vaccines” for the top spot.
It said: “The promising medical solution to the pandemic that has entered our lives in 2020 has also become a political argument and a source of division. “The greatest science story of our time quickly became the biggest debate in our country, and from the heart of both stories was Vaccine. “
This story originally appeared on NS Morning version live blogs.
