Rendezvous. Denouement. Tête-à-tête. These are some of the words I had to look for in a hefty dictionary back in grade school. I even had to lug around a pocket-sized one to get a better understanding of a word I just came across with. Good thing! We now have e-dictionaries we can install on our device. Acquiring immediate, direct access to a search term, its meaning, and ancillary information is now a tap away. Especially now that we have to visit our ever-growing world of words, here and there, to look for terms and words that keep popping in discussion, responses, and written reports.

Merriam-Webster, Inc., an American company that publishes reference books and is especially known for its dictionaries, has its editors devote an hour or two to reading a cross section of published material, including books, newspapers, magazines, and electronic publications. They scour the texts in search of new words, new usages of existing words, variant spellings, and inflected forms–in short, anything that might help in deciding if a word belongs in the dictionary. The editors marked any word of interest, along with surrounding context that offers insight into its form and use. To know more about the process of how a word gets into a Merriam-Webster dictionary, feel free to go here.

The process usually takes at least a few years, but there are cases when a new term made it to the language and immediately becomes part of our collective day-to-day vocabulary. Such is the case with the communication and conversation of the current health crisis. Because of the urgency, importance, and seriousness of these new terms to our exchanges, the publishing company made a special update on March 18th that included terms like COVID-19, social distancing, contact tracing, and community spread.

Naming the Disease

• COVID-19 is a new name for a new disease, coined as an abbreviated form of coronavirus disease 2019.
  
  
• Coronavirus is the broader name for the family of viruses that includes COVID-19, and its entry has been revised to show that relationship. A new example has been added to the entry for novel (“new”).

More Coronavirus-Related Additions

• Self-isolate: to isolate or separate oneself or itself from others.
  
  
• Physical distancing: the practice of maintaining a greater than usual physical space between oneself and other people or of avoiding direct contact with people or objects in public places during the outbreak of a contagious disease in order to minimize exposure and reduce the transmission of infection. A few months ago, terms like these might have seemed too self-explanatory to require definitions, but now there is an immediate and important specificity to them.
  
  
• Contactless: not involving contact. Similarly, both the physical and technological meanings of contactless are being used much more frequently.
  
  
• WFH: an abbreviation for "working from home."
  
  
• PPE: an abbreviation for “personal protective equipment.”
  
  
• Forehead thermometer: a thermometer that is placed on, passed over, or pointed at the forehead to measure a person's body temperature.
  
  
• Intensivist: a physician who specializes in the care and treatment of patients in intensive care.
  
  
• Contact tracing: means the practice of identifying and monitoring individuals who may have had contact with an infectious person as a means of controlling the spread of a communicable disease.
  
  Community spread: refers to the spread of a contagious disease to individuals in a particular geographic location who have no known contact with other infected individuals or who have not recently traveled to an area where the disease has any documented cases.

Specialized Medical Words

• Epidemic curve: a visual representation in the form of a graph or chart depicting the onset and progression of an outbreak of disease and especially infectious disease in a particular population.
  
  
• Immune surveillance: any monitoring process of the immune system that detects and destroys foreign substances, cells, or tissues.
  
  
• Community immunity and herd immunity: a reduction in the risk of infection with a specific communicable disease (such as measles or influenza) that occurs when a significant proportion of the population has become immune to infection (as because of previous exposure or vaccination) so that susceptible individuals are much less likely to come in contact with infected individuals.
  

New Words for Fears

• Iatrophobia: intense fear of doctors.
  
  
• Nosocomephobia: intense fear of hospitals.
  
  
• Tomophobia: intense fear of surgery.
  

These new words are ours for the taking to help us stay in the know. Let us arm ourselves with them as we continue to make more conscious and intentional effort to get across facts, information, and update to our family and friends.




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