“Vax is our 2021 Word of the Year. When our lexicographers began digging into our English language corpus data, it quickly became apparent that vax was a particularly striking term. A relatively rare word in our corpus until this year, by September it was over 72 times more frequent than at the same time last year. It has generated numerous derivatives that we are now seeing in a wide range of informal contexts, from vax sites and vax cards to getting vaxxed and being fully vaxxed, no word better captures the atmosphere of the past year than vax,” Oxford Languages said in a report.
The report also noted that vaccine-related vocabulary has seen a significant increase in frequency of usage, while “the word vaccine, already very common, more than doubled in frequency between September 2020 and September 2021.”
According to the report, there has been a 34-fold increase in the usage of the word vaccinate and an 18-fold increase in the usage of vaccination, after COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in most countries around the world.