Each year, lexicographers at Oxford Languages, the maker of the Oxford English Dictionary, choose a single word or phrase to define the past 12 months. In 2019, it was “climate emergency,” and in 2018, it was “toxic.”
But this year, they couldn’t pick just one.
The pandemic, racial unrest and natural disasters shaped the English language in countless ways in 2020. So Oxford opted to highlight dozens of terms, including “Black Lives Matter,” “Blursday,” “coronavirus,” “lockdown,” “social distancing” and “systemic racism.”
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