Oxford’s 2021 Word of the Year Is a Shot in the Arm

Amid an explosion of Covid-related wordplay, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary crowns “vax.”

Apologies to jab, shot and “Fauci ouchie.” Oxford Languages’s 2021 Word of the Year is “vax.”

That may seem like a no-brainer. But as with so much about public health, the power lies in the numbers.

“Vaccine,” already a common-enough word in English, more than doubled in frequency over the past year, as vaccines against the coronavirus rolled out. But the jaunty “vax” — a word that has skulked around the margins of the language since it first appeared in the 1980s — surged dramatically, occurring more than 72 times as frequently in September 2021 as a year earlier.