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‘Vax’ becomes Oxford Dictionary word of 2021
Vax has been chosen as the word of the year of 2021 at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
Words related to vaccines have spiked in frequency in 2021 due to Covid, with double-vaxxed, unvaxxed and anti-vaxxer all seeing a surge in use.
However, vax was an obvious choice as it has made "the most striking impact", reports BBC quoting OED senior editor Fiona McPherson.
"It goes back at least to the 1980s, but according to our corpus it was rarely used until this year," she said.
Vax and vaxx are both accepted spellings but the form with one x is more common.
Oxford English Dictionary definitions for vax:
--vax n. A vaccine or vaccination
--vax v. Treat (someone) with a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease; vaccinate
--vaxxie n. A photograph of oneself taking during or immediately before or after a vaccination, especially one against Covid-19, and typically shared on social media; a vaccination selfie
--anti-vax adj. Opposed to vaccination
--anti-vaxxer n. A person who is opposed to vaccination
double-vaxxed adj. Having received two doses of a vaccine
Use of the word pandemic has also increased by more than 57,000 percent this year.
This year's Oxford-winning word, vax, was first recorded in English in 1799, while its derivatives vaccinate and vaccination both first appear in 1800.
All of these words ultimately come from the Latin word vacca, which means cow. According to the OED, this is due to English physician and scientist Edward Jenner's pioneering work on vaccination against smallpox in the late 1790s and early 1800s.
Oxford Languages says its corpus, or language resource, gathers news content which is updated daily and contains over 14.5 billion words for lexicographers to search and analyse.
