The Oxford English Dictionary has found it impossible to name any single word of the year for 2020 because of the coronavirus.

Oxford Dictionaries said it was expanding the end-of-year ritual to include several words whose usage spiked as coronavirus dominated the public conversation.

Among the words chosen this year were furlough, bushfires, WFH (work from home), lockdown, moonshot and new coinages like Covid-19, blursday and covidiot.

Read again: Garage fire after cigarette ash sets fire to pet bed

The annual selection reflects “the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of the preceding year, but this year the tribute to linguistic change could not be encapsulated in a single word.

Oxford Mail:

Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, said: “I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had. The Oxford team was identifying hundreds of significant new words and usages as the year unfolded, dozens of which would have been a slam dunk for Word of the Year at any other time."

He added that it was ironic that a year that left the world “speechless” has been filled with new words unlike any other.

The lexicographers have a vast and continually updated database of more than 11 billion words known as a corpus. The Word of the Year is picked from the corpus, based on popular usage and studying “evidence-based data” to explore a year’s language developments.

Read more: Heavy traffic after accident on A40

This year, the usage of the word pandemic has increased more than 57,000 per cent since 2019. The word coronavirus, coined in 1968, has been revived in 2020 after seeing diminishing usage for decades limited only to medical references. Usages of the word coronavirus overtook common nouns like “time.”

The word superspreader, coined back in the seventies, saw a huge spike in usage in October.