Cambridge Dictionary has named the word 'Quarantine' as the Word of the year 2020. The word ‘Quarantine’ has defeated ‘lockdown’ and ‘pandemic’ to be crowned as Word of the Year 2020 due to the data showed it as one of the most highly searched for on the Cambridge Dictionary. Quarantine was the only word to rank in the top five for both search spikes (28,545) and overall views (more than 183,000 by early November), with the largest spike in searches seen the week of 18-24 March, the period which most countries across the globe entered lockdown. 

The Cambridge Dictionary editors have also tracked how people are using quarantine, and have discovered a new meaning emerging: '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'. Research also reveals the word is 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 meaning has been added to the dictionary, marking a shift from existing meanings that relate to containing a person or animal suspected of being contagious: 'a specific period of time in which a person or animal that has a disease, or may have one, must stay or be kept away from others in order to prevent the spread of the disease'.

Cambridge says the words that people search reveals what matters most to the people in relation to the events happening in the world. To the surprise neither coronavirus nor Covid 19 is the most searched. The two runners-up on the shortlist for Word of the Year are lockdown, and pandemic itself.  

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