2020 Was Too Unprecedented for Just One Word of the Year

If someone asked you for one word to describe 2020, chances are you might come up with something profane. But even if your vocabulary was a little less colorful, you might have difficulty limiting your selection to just one word. That’s the same problem the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary had when they were debating on their annual Word of the Year. Last year, they settled on "climate emergency," and in 2018, their pick was "toxic." But they said, “Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.” So instead they analyzed their...