“Vax”, neologism for vaccine, was chosen the word of the year by lexicographers of the Oxford English-language dictionary. The “word of the year” is chosen from a bank of 14.5 billion words continually updated and expanded and collected from English-language news sources.
The choice should “reflect the ethos, mood and concerns” of the year and have “the potential to be a term with lasting cultural significance”. In September, “vax” appeared 72 times more than in 2020.
The use of words related to vaccines exploded in 2021 due to the Covid pandemic, with emphasis on “double-vaxxed” (with two doses of vaccine), “unvaxxed” (not vaccinated) and “anti-vaxxer” (antivacin).
In 2020, Oxford decided not to pick a single word and highlighted several, in addition to the pandemic’s abrupt influence on language broadly. Therefore, they were chosen, among others, “Covid-19”, “WFH” (working from home) and “lockdown”, a word that was also chosen by the Collins dictionary as word of the year. In 2013, Oxford selected the word “selfie”; in 2016, “post-truth” (post-truth); in 2019, “climatic emergency”.
“The word ‘vax’, more than any other, injected itself into the bloodstream of the English language in 2021,” Oxford said in a pun-filled statement. “Vaccine” was first recorded in the English language in 1799, after English scientist Edward Jenner experimented with inoculations against smallpox. In early records, the word, derived from the Latin vacca, was used to refer both to the disease and to material extracted from blisters caused by smallpox and injected into humans.
Only decades later, according to Oxford, did it come to be used to indicate inoculations against diseases. The shortened form, “vax”, did not appear until the 1980s, although “anti-vax” appeared earlier.
Some terms attached to “vax” indicate the controversies surrounding immunizers. “Vaxxident” (traffic accident due to alleged effects of vaccines), for example, was only registered on anti-vaccine websites.
New this year is that, for the first time, the Oxford report analyzed the vocabulary linked to the chosen word in nine other languages. Many languages, such as French and Russian, use an English version of the word. In Spanish, the word used for vaccine is “vacuna”, feminine inflection of the adjective “vacuno”, bovine. In Urdu, vaccine is “teeka”, which refers to injections of all kinds.
According to senior report editor Fiona McPherson, “vax” was an obvious choice because it was the word with “the greatest impact.” “Although the word has been around since the 1980s, it was rarely used,” he said.
The use of the word pandemic, in turn, has increased by more than 57,000% this year.
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