Confinement, quarantine, asymptomatic and swab were some of the most searched words in the Priberam dictionary in 2020, a year marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictive measures it imposed around the world.
For the fourth consecutive year, Priberam and the Lusa agency have teamed up to select the most searched words in the dictionary, which illustrate the year that is ending.
There are 31 words chosen, from the 250 most searched, which are listed as of today on the 'site' http://oanoempalavras.pt/, which also includes news content from the Lusa agency, to contextualize each of the words, illustrating them with photographs taken by its photojournalists.
The year in words can also be accessed through Lusa's website.
The 'site' is structured in chronological order, from January to December, and each word allows direct access to its meaning in the Priberam Dictionary and to Lusa's article about the event that motivated the searches.
Many of these words refer directly to the pandemic and, at the top of the queries in the Priberam Dictionary, the most searched of all was precisely pandemic.
Lethality, placebo, disruption, resurgence, calamity, freedom, teleschool and coronavirus are other words most researched, which were directly or indirectly related to covid-19.
Arrest, stampede, clearance, euthanasia, excuse, candy, diligence, anti-racism, politicization, frugal, perseverance, catenary, double, femicide, cristophobia, uprising, pedestrian and essayist complete the list of the 31 selected words.
However, there are many more words related to the pandemic, which are among the most searched in the dictionary: hoarding, comorbidity, corona, dissemination, epidemic, isolation, mitigation, moratorium, prophylactic, underreporting, telework or even the flu (a purpose of a comment by the Brazilian president on the disease).
The anti-racist movements that gained strength this year, driven by the death of the American George Floyd, followed by the murders of actor Bruno Candé, in Portugal, and João Alberto Freitas, in Brazil, and other media cases, such as the insults to soccer players Moussa Marega and Pierre Webó, they also justified the high number of searches for words like black, black, racism and xenophobia.
Other searches that stood out in 2020 also include disinformation (EU asked Google and Twitter to fight further against disinformation), emeritus (King emeritus Juan Carlos left Spain and Pope emeritus Benedict XVI sick), legacy (birthday of Aristides Sousa Mendes ), proselytism (manifested against citizenship classes), fierce (US presidential elections), gutter and orgy (ultra-conservative MEP caught in an illegal orgy in Brussels) or gambito (Netflix series).
The information director of Lusa, Luísa Meireles, highlighted that, in every word, “there is news that Lusa gave to the Portuguese” and that became part of daily life in 2020, adding that “nothing escaped”, a “feat achieved daily by agency".
For the founder of Priberam Carlos Amaral, this “is a project that, since it has the collaboration of Lusa, namely through the quality of the photographs and the texts of the news, has gained a new graphic dimension and an impact that allows to contextualize each story and offer a different way of (re)viewing the year”.
Priberam also points out that the records of queries in the Priberam Dictionary are once again broken, with about 261 million searches since January 2020 (almost double the 133 million searches last year), and a total of 45 million users (seven million more than in 2019).
This was also the year in which the website of the Priberam Dictionary became part of the netAudience ranking, a list maintained by Marktest and which registers the most visited Portuguese websites each month: the Priberam Dictionary appeared in May as leader in queries carried out from computers, having been the only one to surpass the million users barrier.
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