The OED is updating its coverage to take account of these developments, and as something of a departure, this update comes outside of our usual quarterly publication cycle. 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. As the spread of the disease has altered the lives of billions of people, it has correspondingly ushered in a new vocabulary to the general populace encompassing specialist terms from the fields of epidemiology and medicine, new acronyms, and words to express the societal imperatives of imposed isolation and distancing. Covid-19, a shortening of coronavirus disease 2019, and its various manifestations has done just that. It is 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. Social change and linguistic change: the language of Covid-19

Change language in word 2019