“Confinement” is the word of the year 2020 for the Foundation for Urgent Spanish (FundéuRAE), promoted by the EFE Agency and the Royal Spanish Academy.
Defined as ‘temporary and generally imposed isolation of a population, a person or a group for health or safety reasons’This term has marked a good part of the months of the year that now ends. The health crisis derived from the covid-19 pandemic is, without a doubt, the protagonist of 2020 and lhe measures implemented to stop it have radically changed the way we live and speak.
Virtually the entire planet has been confined at some point, for more or less time, because of the coronavirus. And that is a completely exceptional circumstance today.
Why pandemics have been more in recent years, the coronavirus is a family of viruses with similar characteristics that already existed and whose term was used by the scientific community, and even SARS-CoV-2 itself has not affected us all in the same way. But, in the midst of this health crisis, there is something that has equaled us: confinement.
It could have been a couple of weeks, a month, two months, or one of the longest like the one they have lived in the city of Buenos Aires, but it’s something we’ve all experienced. Several European countries once again confine their citizens at home, in Spain perimeter confinements occur. For many, the meaning given to the word itself has changed.
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The Royal Spanish Academy, in its most recent update of the “Dictionary of the Spanish language” (“DLE”) of November 2020, has modified the entry of the word “confinement” to adjust it to the reality that millions of people around the world have experienced due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Likewise, “Confinement” is the best alternative to Anglicism “lockdown” to designate the forced confinement of the population in their homes.
The winner has been chosen among a list of twelve candidates in which were other words that have marked the year that ends. The list of candidates for word of 2020 proposed by the FundéuRAE also included “Coronavirus”, “infodemic”, “resilience”, “COVID-19”, “teleworking”, “conspiracy”, “(a) tiktok”, “statuephobia”, “pandemic”, “health” and “vaccine”.
This is the eighth time that FundéuRAE has chosen, from among the more than 250 terms to which it has dedicated some of its daily recommendations on the use of the language, its word of the year. The first of them was “escrache”, in 2013, followed by “selfi” (2014), “refugee” (2015), “populism” (2016), “aporophobia” (2017), “microplastic” (2018) and emojis (2019).
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