Merriam-Webster announced its 2020 Word of the Year on Monday. No surprise as it selected the word, “pandemic.”

Merriam-Webster Editor at Large Peter Sokolowski, via ‘The Associated Press’ said, “Often the big news story has a technical word that’s associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general.”

Searches for the word spiked in March when the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. Coronavirus, quarantine, mamba and malarkey were among the runners up based on the site’s search spikes.

COVID-19 was also added to the site’s entries within a month after being coined in February

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