The Cambridge Dictionary
Word of the Year 2020 is …
18 March saw the highest volume of searches for quarantine on a single day, with 4,027 lookups.
quarantine
noun [ U ]
UK
/ˈkwɒr.
n.tiːn/
ə
/ˈkwɔːr.
n.tiːn/
ə
US
a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease
The largest spike in searches occurred in the week of 18-24 March, when many countries around the world went into varying states of lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Our dictionary editors have researched how people were using the word quarantine, and discovered a new meaning emerging. The research showed us that the word is now being used synonymously with lockdown, particularly in the United States, to refer to a situation in which people stay home to avoid catching the disease.
This new sense of quarantine has now been added to the Cambridge Dictionary, and marks a shift from the existing meanings that relate to containing a person or animal suspected of being contagious.
Quarantine was the only word to rank in the top 5 for both overall views and search spikes in 2020. Our word of the year saw more than 183,000 views on Cambridge Dictionary by early November.
Why quarantine?
What does the data show?
30,000
20,000
= page views
Click to
see more
6,000
= page views
4,000
2,000
The largest spike in searches, with 28,545 lookups, was seen in the week of 18-24 March, when many countries around the world went into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March there were 75,229 lookups in total for quarantine.
Neither coronavirus nor COVID-19 appeared among the words that Cambridge Dictionary users searched for most this year. This indicates that people have been fairly confident about what the virus is. Instead, users have been searching for words related to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic, as evidenced not just by quarantine but by the two runners-up on the shortlist for Word of the Year: lockdown, and pandemic itself.
What does it say about 2020?
“The words that people search for reveal not just what is happening in the world, but what matters most to them in relation to those events.”
Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary
We spoke to a few celebrities who wanted to share their thoughts about our Word of the Year, and how quarantine has affected their lives personally.
What people think about quarantine today …
Watch the full video
Take a deeper look at how
quarantine is being used
Learn more
To see how quarantine is being used, we looked at a multi-million-word collection of language that has recently been written about COVID-19 in news, blogs, social media, and websites from around the world.
Expand your coronavirus-related vocabulary and test yourself with our Words about COVID-19 word list, specially created by the team at Cambridge Dictionary. You can access this word list and many more by signing up to Cambridge Dictionary +Plus.
Our COVID-19 word list
Learn more
The interest in quarantine and other related terms was reflected not only in our search statistics, but also in visits to our blog, About Words. The most highly viewed blog post this year was Quarantine, carriers and face masks: the language of the coronavirus, which saw almost 80,000 views in the first 6 weeks after it was posted.
Learn about words on our blog
Read more
Check out the last five Cambridge Dictionary Words of the Year. How did they reflect what you were thinking about in those years?
Previous Words of the Year
2019 – upcycling
2018 – nomophobia
2017 – populism
2016 – paranoid
2015 – austerity
Even if we’re expert speakers of English, the way in which language is used isn’t always an easy thing to describe or explain. Language is nuanced and changeable, and varies from person to person. Often, word patterns and associations aren’t things we can easily pick out or describe just by reading newspaper articles or by scrolling through tweets. This is especially true with new words and meanings. So, to find out more about how words behave, we look at big collections of them – this is called a corpus.
Take a deeper look at how
quarantine is being used
Find out more
The interest in quarantine and other related terms was reflected not only in our search statistics, but also in visits to our blog, About Words. The most highly viewed blog post this year was Quarantine, carriers and face masks: the language of the coronavirus, which saw almost 80,000 views in the first 6 weeks after it was posted.
Learn about words on our blog
Read more
We’re also able to look at how similarly quarantine behaves when compared to other words. This diagram shows that isolation is the most closely related, with lockdown also being used in similar contexts.
Quarantine, isolation and lockdown — similar but different?
What did we find?
There is a strong link between quarantine and words associated with obligation – things we don’t have a choice about. This highlights the sense of quarantine being strongly linked to a person’s moral and/or legal duty to keep themselves away from others during a time when they may have COVID-19.
Along with this, lots of words relating to the scale of the quarantine (local, national, nationwide) and the location of where the quarantine takes place (home, community, institutional) are found in the data.
mandatory quarantine
strict quarantine
quarantine rules
quarantine orders
quarantine obligations
quarantine requirement
forced to quarantine
Key word pairings
Words that modify quarantine, and words it modifies
What did we do?
Take a deeper look at how
quarantine is being used
To see how quarantine and related words are used, we looked at a multi-million-word collection of language that has recently been written about COVID-19 in news, blogs, social media, and websites from around the world. In particular, we used this to look at what writers mean by quarantine and at how it’s typically used.
Word associations — Quarantine and a sense of obligation
The diagram shows how we can map which words are used before quarantine to describe it (to modify it), and which words quarantine modifies (are used after it). The orange section of the diagram shows that quarantine is modified by other words more than it is acting as the modifier itself.
= nouns modified by quarantine
= modifiers of quarantine
The larger the circle, the larger its frequency of use. The smaller the circle, the lesser frequency of use. The closer to the centre of the diagram, the closer the relationship to quarantine.
Bigger circles show higher frequency of use. Smaller circles represent fewer uses. The closer to quarantine in the middle, the more similar the use. The further out, the less similar it is.
How quarantine behaves with other words
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Expand your coronavirus-related vocabulary and test yourself with our Words about COVID-19 word list, specially created by the team at Cambridge Dictionary. You can access this word list and many more by signing up to Cambridge Dictionary +Plus.
Our COVID-19 word list
Learn more
The interest in quarantine and other related terms was reflected not only in our search statistics, but also in visits to our blog, About Words. The most highly viewed blog post this year was Quarantine, carriers and face masks: the language of the coronavirus, which saw almost 80,000 views in the first 6 weeks after it was posted.
Learn about words on our blog
Read more
Our analysis found that quarantine, rather than isolation, is more often found with words that are associated with non-compliance like break, leave, and evade, and with words relating to travel such as arrive and depart.
This may reflect the fact that quarantine is often used to describe the activity when COVID-19 infection is a risk but is unconfirmed (for example, when returning from another country but feeling healthy), whereas isolation often refers to those who have confirmed infections. And so perhaps we are more willing to break, leave, and evade quarantine if we believe we aren’t a risk to others?
The insights gained from this kind of research show us how language is used in the real world, which enables us to shape how we describe and use these words in our teaching and learning.
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The Cambridge Dictionary
Word of the Year
2020 is …
Expand your coronavirus-related vocabulary and test yourself with our Words about COVID-19 word list, specially created by the team at Cambridge Dictionary. You can access this word list and many more by signing up to Cambridge Dictionary +Plus.
Our COVID-19 word list
Learn more
The interest in quarantine and other related terms was reflected not only in our search statistics, but also in visits to our blog, About Words. The most highly viewed blog post this year was Quarantine, carriers and face masks: the language of the coronavirus, which saw almost 80,000 views in the first 6 weeks after it was posted.
Learn about words on our blog
Read more
Even if we’re expert speakers of English, the way in which language is used isn’t always an easy thing to describe or explain. Language is nuanced and changeable, and varies from person to person. Often, word patterns and associations aren’t things we can easily pick out or describe just by reading newspaper articles or by scrolling through tweets. This is especially true with new words and meanings. So, to find out more about how words behave, we look at big collections of them – this is called a corpus.
Take a deeper look at how
quarantine is being used
Find out more
Even if we’re expert speakers of English, the way in which language is used isn’t always an easy thing to describe or explain. Language is nuanced and changeable, and varies from person to person. Often, word patterns and associations aren’t things we can easily pick out or describe just by reading newspaper articles or by scrolling through tweets. This is especially true with new words and meanings. So, to find out more about how words behave, we look at big collections of them – this is called a corpus.
How do we investigate how words are used?