The top 10 words of 2020!

Ahh 2020. A year that most of us would prefer to forget.

But it did bring us some new vocabulary.

In the next seven minutes, we bring you a countdown

of the BBC Learning English top ten words

of 2020.

So of course this was the year that we all turned to video conferencing to stay in touch

[Can you unmute yourself please?] as the world went into lockdown

[press, press the mute button]

but a lot of us forgot to turn our sound on

[mute, you’re on mute] and so this

word came into our lives:

Let’s hope that by the end of the year we’ll all know where that mute button is and when

to use it.

[you’re on mute, Sam. Can you unmute your microphone? Sure, hello. Can you

hear me now? Yeah, we can hear you now.]

This year’s coronavirus outbreak means we’ve all had to get used to events being cancelled.

But this year the verb ‘cancel’ has also been used to describe how people with unpopular

views are ‘removed’ from public life.

Here’s Feifei to explain:

‘Cancelling' someone means to stop supporting or following someone, particularly

a public figure, because of something they have said or done.

It’s also known as a ‘cancel culture’.

If you’re watching this far, you haven’t cancelled us yet –

and we’re happy about that.

This one’s a two-word phrase that many of us used for the very first time in 2020 as

Coronavirus brought people together at the same time as it drove us apart.

Whatever method we used to stay in touch with our friends, neighbours and colleagues,

we started ending our conversations with the words ‘stay safe’

because we wanted them to do just that.

[Ok, stay safe. Stay safe! Stay safe and join us next time. Bye.]

Despite everything that happened in 2020, the global plastic mountain kept getting higher

and higher and we kept seeing and saying more and more phrases with the word ‘plastic’

as we kept talking about ways of getting to grips with the plastic problem.

Let’s hope it’s not too long before we’re living in a post-plastic world.

Oh! Did I just make a word up?

2 metres, one metre, one metre plus… we’ve all had to learn not to get too close to our

friends, neighbours, waiters, shop assistants, delivery drivers, everyone really!

And we brought you some expressions to make sure we stick to the rules:

Could you just stand back a bit, please?

Shall we do the social distancing thing?

Not too close! Are we far enough apart?

No, that’s not a spelling mistake. As coronavirus spread from country to country,

leading the World Health Organisation to declare a pandemic on the 11th of March 2020,

Some people began to think it’s all a big conspiracy.

Not everybody agrees, but either way, we’ve certainly seen a lot of this word this year.

You didn’t think we could get through this list without talking about

the US elections, did you?

There were so many words we could have chosen

but one word that Donald Trump kept using

before, during and after the election was ‘fraud’.

Trump and his supporters claimed that there was widespread fraud during the

US elections; others said there was little, if any, evidence for this.

As the arguing continues, we’ve got a feeling we’ll still be talking about

these elections for quite a few years to come.

Royal watchers were stunned on the eighth of January 2020 when Prince Harry and Meghan

Markle announced their intention to leave the UK and go off to do their own thing across

the Atlantic.

And in a clever play on the portmanteau word ‘Brexit’,

witty commentators quickly came up the the even wittier ‘Megxit’ and we’ve

been using it ever since.

We wish you well Harry and Megan, whatever you’re doing.

We could have gone for plain old ‘coronavirus’ for this one, but we’re all about the language

here and any word that is made up from three words

and a number has to be up there on our list.

The three words? The ‘CO’ from ‘corona’, the ‘VI’ from ‘virus’, the ‘D’

from ‘disease’ and the number 19 from the year 2019 when the virus first appeared

gave us a word that we just couldn’t stop using in 2020.

There’s just one more word to go.

We’ve had a great year bringing you all the vocabulary

you need to talk about the world and everything that’s happened in it in 2020:

the good things as well as the not-so-good things.

We’d love to bring you more words but all we can do right now

is to tell you to visit us on BBC Learning English

to find great language learning content throughout 2021, whatever it has in store for us.

And now, the BBC Learning English word of the year 2020 is….

Lockdown.

As we all stocked up on essentials, put on our loungewear and got used to workout

videos, zoom calls and weight gain, the one word that summed up our pain, worry and fears

as well as our hope, kindness and patience was ‘lockdown’ –

a noun made from the 2 words ‘lock’ and ‘down’

that summarised the changes to the world’s way of life for most -

and for many people - all of 2020.

So that’s it. We hope that you’ve enjoyed

this look back at some of the English words – old and new – that we’ve used, perhaps

more than we thought we would, in 2020.

We’re sure there will be many more to come in 2021

- and we’ll be right here to explore them with you. Goodbye.