Oxford dictionary revised to record linguistic impact of Covid-19

With terms such as WFH, social distancing and self-isolation now in common parlance, the Oxford English Dictionary has made an extraordinary update to include Covid-19 and words related to the pandemic in its definitive record of the English language.

随着“WFH”（work from home，在家办公）、“保持社交距离”和“自我隔离”等词汇成为常用词，《牛津英语词典》进行了一次非常规更新，将新冠肺炎疫情相关词汇纳入其中。

parlance[ˈpɑːləns]：n.说法；用语

The dictionary’s executive editor Bernadette Paton said that it was “a rare experience for lexicographers to observe an exponential rise in usage of a single word in a very short period of time, and for that word to come overwhelmingly to dominate global discourse, even to the exclusion of most other topics”.

《牛津英语词典》执行编辑伯纳黛特·帕顿说：“在很短的时间内观察到一个词汇的使用量呈指数级上升，并压倒性地主导全球语言趋势，甚至让大多数其他话题毫无容身之地，这对词典编纂者来说非常罕见。”

Covid-19 has done that, and has thus been added as a new entry in the OED, where it is described as “an acute respiratory illness in humans caused by a coronavirus, which is capable of producing severe symptoms and death, esp. in the elderly and others with underlying health conditions”.

“新冠肺炎”就是这样一个词，也由此成为《牛津英语词典》中新增加的一个词条，其定义为“一种由冠状病毒引起的人类急性呼吸道疾病，能产生严重的症状，致人死亡，特别是对老年人和有其他潜在健康问题的人群。”

exponential[ˌekspəˈnenʃl]：adj.指数的

“As something of a departure, this update comes outside of our usual quarterly publication cycle,” said Paton. “But these are extraordinary times, and OED lexicographers, who like many others are all working from home … are tracking the development of the language of the pandemic and offering a linguistic and historical context to their usage.”

帕顿说：“这次更新有些不同，它不在我们通常的季度发布周期。但现在是非常时期，《牛津英语词典》的编纂者们和其他许多人一样，都是在家工作，他们正在追踪新冠肺炎疫情时期语言的发展，并为其词汇的用法提供语言和历史背景。”

The OED’s analysis of more than 8bn words of online news stories found that coronavirus and Covid-19, a shortening of coronavirus disease 2019, are now dominating global discourse. While back in December, words such as Brexit, impeachment and climate dominated news, by January, coronavirus was seeing significant use alongside current affairs terms such as bushfire, koala, Iraqi, locust and assassination. By March every single word in the OED’s top 20 list of keywords was related to coronavirus.

《牛津英语词典》分析了包含80多亿个词汇的网络新闻，发现冠状病毒和Covid-19（2019年新冠肺炎的缩写）现在主导着全球的讨论。去年12月，“英国脱欧”、“弹劾”、“气候”等词汇占据了新闻头条，而到了今年1月，“冠状病毒”与“丛林大火”、“考拉”、“伊拉克”、“蝗虫”、“暗杀”等时事词汇一起被大量使用。今年3月，《牛津英语词典》列出的20个最关键词汇中的每一个单词都与冠状病毒有关。

“In January, the words mainly relate to naming and describing the virus: coronavirus, SARS, virus, human-to-human, respiratory, flu-like,” said the OED in an analysis. “By March, the keywords reflect the social impact of the virus, and issues surrounding the medical response: social distancing, self-isolation and self-quarantine, lockdown, non-essential (as in non-essential travel), and postpone are all especially frequent, as are PPE and ventilator.”

《牛津英语词典》在分析中写道：“1月的高频词主要与病毒的命名和描述有关：冠状病毒、非典、病毒、人传人、呼吸系统、流感样。到了3月，这些关键词反映了新冠病毒的社会影响，以及医疗应对相关问题：保持社交距离、自我隔离、封锁、非必要的（如非必要的旅行）、推迟、个人防护用品和呼吸机等词汇的使用都特别频繁。”

The OED’s lexicographers have noticed a rise in the use of specialist medical terms and new acronyms, such as WFH and PPE. The first noted usage of working from home was in 1995, but Paton notes that “the abbreviation was known to very few before it became a way of life for so many of us”. The abbreviation PPE, for personal protective equipment, dates back to 1977 but was “formerly probably restricted to healthcare and emergency professionals”.

《牛津英语词典》的编纂者们注意到，越来越多的人开始使用专业医学术语和新的缩写词，比如WFH（在家办公）和PPE（个人防护用品）。1995年，人们首次注意到“在家办公”的用法，但帕顿指出，“在居家办公成为我们许多人的生活方式之前，很少有人知道这个缩写。”个人防护用品的缩写PPE可以追溯到1977年，但“以前可能仅限于医护和急救专业人员使用”。

Social distancing, first used in 1957, “was originally an attitude rather than a physical term, referring to an aloofness or a deliberate attempt to distance oneself from others socially. Now we all understand it as keeping a physical distance between ourselves and others to avoid infection,” wrote Paton.

“保持社交距离”这种说法最早出现于1957年，“最初是一种态度，而不是一个描述身体距离的术语，指的是一种超然的态度，或者在社交上故意疏远他人。现在我们都明白，这是为了避免感染而与他人保持身体上的距离”，帕顿写道。

aloofness [əˈluːfnəs]：n.冷漠；高傲；超然离群

Previous pandemics have also given rise to new vocabulary. Usage of “pestilence”, or “a fatal epidemic or disease”, first appears in 1382, not long after the bubonic plague peaked in Europe between 1347 and 1351. The adjective “self-quarantined” was first used in 1878 to describe the actions of the villagers of Eyam in the 17th century, who isolated themselves to prevent the second wave of “Black Death” from spreading to surrounding villages.

以前的疾病大流行也产生过新的词汇。“瘟疫（尤指鼠疫）”或“一种致命的流行病或疾病”这种说法首次出现在1382年，就在欧洲黑死病于1347年至1351年达到顶峰后不久。形容词“自我隔离的”在1878年首次被用来描述17世纪埃亚姆村村民的行为，他们将自己隔离起来，以防止第二波黑死病蔓延到周围的村庄。

“It is a consistent theme of lexicography that great social change brings great linguistic change, and that has never been truer than in this current global crisis,” wrote Paton.

帕顿写道：“词典编纂的一个一贯主题是，巨大的社会变化带来了巨大的语言变化，而在当前的全球危机中，这一点从未如此真实。”