Merriam-Webster Dictionary Reveals 2021 Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster has officially announced the 2021 Word of the Year!

An annual tradition based on the events of the year and popularity of certain words, the Word of the Year reflects which word has been culturally significant over the course of 2021.

However, the company revealed in a statement that there’s more to the 2021 Word of the Year than meets the eye.

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“Vaccine lookups increased 600%, and the story is about much more than medicine,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s Editor at Large, per ComicBook.com. “It was at the center of debates about personal choice, political affiliation, professional regulations, school safety, healthcare inequity, and so much more. The biggest science event of the year quickly became the biggest political debate in our country, and the word at the center of both stories is vaccine. Few words can express so much about one moment in time.”

According to Merriam-Webster’s website, the interest in “vaccine” spiked around the time of discussions about distribution, mandates and recommendations.

As the COVID-19 vaccine functions differently than other vaccines by utilizing messenger RNA, the company revised and expanded its entry for the word in May.

The former definition for “vaccine” was “a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease” and the new definition reads:

1 : a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease: such as

a : an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated (see ATTENUATED sense 2) pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin)

b : a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)

Find out all the latest news about the COVID-19 vaccine here.