This episode originally aired on Jan. 28, 2020. Both Merriam Webster’s and Dictionary.com named “pandemic” their word of the year for 2020. On March 11, 2020, the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the word fueled Merriam Webster’s single largest spike in dictionary traffic in 2020, an increase of more than 115,806% over searches the same day in 2019.