The company that creates the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen ‘vax’ as its word of the year.
Oxford Languages claimed that vax had injected itself into the bloodstream during the pandemic.
The number of people using the word “vax” was up 72 percent in September last year, when Moderna, AstraZeneca & Pfizer were seen making their way into arms all across the country.
The Oxford English Dictionary was created by the company ‘vax’. (stock image).
It was also reported that the word “vax” had been expanded to include a wider range contexts, such as “anti-vax”, ‘anti vaxxers”, and ‘vax cards,” according to the Guardian.
The word of the year is based on usage evidence drawn from Oxford’s continually updated corpus of more than 14.5 billion words, gathered from news sources across the English-speaking world.
Oxford Languages stated that the trend was also evident in other languages, such as the Portuguese ‘vacina’ and French ‘vaccin’.
The word of the year is based on usage evidence drawn from Oxford’s continually updated corpus of more than 14.5 billion words, gathered from news sources across the English-speaking world (stock image)
Casper Grathwohl (the president of Oxford Languages) stated that vax was the obvious choice when reviewing the language evidence.
‘The word’s dramatic spike in usage caught our attention first.
“Then we ran the analysis, and a story started emerging that showed how vax was at the centre our preoccupations this past year.”
The use of the word ‘vaccine’ can be dated back to the end of the eighteenth century when an English physician named Edward Jenner found cowpox could be used as a vaccine against smallpox.