Grandma Girl here, I'm Minyeon Fokerti and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we'll talk about all the different words of the year and the bee kisses.

The word of the year announcements always fascinate me and give a real look into the

zeitgeist and the ways different people in countries experienced the last year.

And I'm sure it won't surprise most of you that most of last year's words were about

the pandemic and politics.

The clear winner for 2021 was Vaccine, which was the word of the year from Merriam Webster,

the economist, the foundation for emerging Spanish in Spain and by vote from the readers

of the Portugal news.

And then Oxford Languages also chose a variation of the word Vax.

Most of the online dictionaries use their lookup data or corpus data to choose or at least

narrow down their choices.

For example, in a recent interview in the Zoom show called that word chat hosted by Mark

Allen, who you may know on Twitter is editor Mark.

Peter Sackelowski, editor at Largett Merriam Webster, said that for the entire year vaccine

was in the top 20 or 25 words people were looking up on their site.

And that lookups for that word were 1048% higher than in 2019.

He said that all the way back in May, they were thinking that this would likely be the

word of the year because it was just so huge.

And in fact, Merriam Webster also updated their definition of vaccine in May because the

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