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The hot word from the Collins Dictionary of 2020-Closing the City, “sums up and condenses the common experience of hundreds of millions of people.”
The world famous English dictionary, the Collins English Dictionary, was the first to announce that “Lockdown” has become the hot word of the year in 2020 due to its increasing rate of use during the new corona epidemic.
The Collins Dictionary, along with the Oxford Dictionary and the Cambridge Dictionary, are the three most authoritative dictionaries in the English-speaking world. Each year, these top three dictionaries announce the hottest words of the year, highlighting the words that people use the most due to the events of greatest concern that year.
When the Collins Dictionary announced that “shutting down the city” was the hot word of the year, the word “summed up and condensed the common experience of hundreds of millions of people.”
A blog posted on the official Collins Dictionary website explained that “closing the city” is the state we fear the most in 2020: the entire country has come to a standstill and almost all normal public life has been suspended. “We hardly saw anyone, we didn’t go anywhere, we stayed at home.”
The blog explained that the English word Lockdown was originally part of the prison vocabulary, referring to prisoners confined to cells. “The meaning of this term has undergone an irreversible change in 2020. In most people’s minds, the city closure is now a public health measure and its use has doubled since 2019.”
Hot word rating
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In March 2020 Piccadilly Circus, packed with people in central London, was very quiet on weekdays.
Each year, the editorial office of the Collins Dictionary selects ten noteworthy candidate words from its massive vocabulary of tens of thousands, and then ranks the word with the highest average increase on the candidate list as the hot word of the year.
Among the top ten candidates this year, in addition to the “closed city” that ranked first, were also included:
- Coronavirus
- Black Lives Matter (BLM)
- Key workers
- Suspended and paid leave
- Self insulating
- Distancing
- Megan exits MEGxit
- Douyin Celebrity TicToker
- Eat and spread Mukbung
Six of these ten candidates are related to the new crown epidemic. The other four reflect social and political changes in 2020. Among them, after the death of the young American George Floyd, the use of the term “the life of blacks is also the life of BLM” increased by 581%.
And the video application developed by the Chinese company ByteDance, Douyin, will become a new phenomenon that will be popular on social media platforms in 2020 due to the large number of downloads and users globally. Douyin celebrities who post content on Douyin as a platform have also become one of the candidates this year.
Helen Newstead, Language Content Consultant for the Collins Dictionary, said: “Language is the embodiment of the world around us, and 2020 has been dominated by the global pandemic.”
“The city closure has affected the way we work, study, shop and socialize. With many countries closing the city for the second time to combat the epidemic, this is certainly not an annual hot word to celebrate, but it is the best summary and summary of this year. word. “
Looking back
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Douyin has taken the world by storm, and “Tiktoker” has become one of the top ten words in this year’s Collins dictionary.
As the end of the year approaches, the annual hot words from the other two English dictionaries, Oxford and Cambridge, will soon be announced. Will the yearly hot words from these two dictionaries be different from the Collins dictionary? Judging by the annual hot words selected by the three main dictionaries in recent years, although the final results of the dictionaries are different, the social and cultural backgrounds considered are very similar.
Hot words in the collins dictionary
- 2019: climate strike
- 2018: single use
- 2017: fake news
- 2016: Brexit
- 2015: compulsive watch
The Oxford English Dictionary’s annual hot words for the past five years are:
- 2019: climate emergency
- 2018: toxic
- 2017: youth earthquake
- 2016: Publish the truth
- 2015: Emoji
