In a 2016 article published in this journal (Roig–Marín, Reference Roig–Marín2016), I argued that the coinage of cyber-blends reflects our blended digital/physical relationships in today's world. The current pandemic has put a halt to our everyday lives and all forms of physical contact, and so technologies and digital experiences now play a more conspicuous role than ever. We have gone online and got used to vocabulary whose usage prior to COVID-19 was very limited (e.g. quarantine and pandemic) or known to very few (coronavirus, super-spreader, or the abbreviations PPE ‘personal protective equipment’ or WFH ‘working from home’), while coming to terms with the implications of others such as self-isolation, lockdown, or social distancing (which should be better called physical distancing as social closeness, albeit non-physically, is very much needed to get through these difficult times). Short pieces on coroneologisms have attested to the rise of many new lexical formations, mostly blends.Footnote ¹ According to Thorne (Reference Thorne2020; also cited in CBC, 2020), more than 1,000 new words – both non-specialised and technical terminology – have been created during the current pandemic. Journalists and Twitter users are particularly prone to coin words displaying a high level of linguistic ingenuity; yet, the circulation of that lexis may be very limited. The present note overviews some of the most widely spread vocabulary related to our new COVID-19 reality, coming from the laity rather than from medical or scientific professionals. Alongside terms like social distancing and lockdown, less technical and more playful vocabulary has transcended linguistic boundaries. Particular attention will be paid to examples from European languages whose word-stocks share a common Latinate substratum, likewise central to scientific communication.

Unsurprisingly, the clipped word corona, from the compound coronavirus, and to a lesser extent, the acronym covid (written both in capital letters and in lower case) feature prominently not only in English but also in many other languages. Covid has been borrowed as an Anglicism and users of languages with grammatical gender like French, Catalan, Spanish, and Italian have tended to prefer the masculine gender because of its associations with (corona)virus, masculine in those languages. Nevertheless, French and Spanish prescriptivists, among others, have pointed out that because it stands for coronavirus disease Footnote ², it should be feminine following the gender of the head of the phrase (i.e. disease).Footnote ³ Covid-derived Anglicisms including covidiot (‘a person who ignores public health advice, thereby putting others at risk’) and covidivorces (‘divorces during quarantine’) are widely attested cross-linguistically. Some records of their usage include the French headline ‘Les «covidiots», une triste épidémie de bêtise et de bassesses’ (Ouest, 2020) or the headline ‘Historias del ‘covidivorcio’’ from a Spanish newspaper (El país, 2020), the latter showing the second element in its Spanish rendering, divorcio (creating what is known as a ‘loanblend’ [Haugen, Reference Haugen1950]), a strategy which seems to be very productive in Spanish coroneologisms (see also, e.g., covidiotas [covid + Sp. idiotas ‘idiots’] and Zoompleaños [Zoom + Sp. cumpleaños ‘birthday’]).Footnote ⁴ In the case of other forms containing corona such as coronacoma and anticoronavirus, the question of whether the new forms in languages other than English have been calqued on English or are endogenous (i.e. language-internal) developments can be more complex because their components (e.g. coma, anti-, and corona) were already attested in all those languages. Unlike covid, a newly integrated Anglicism, corona is found in Latin and Romance languages with the primary meaning of ‘crown’, until its clipping (< coronavirus) became popular across nations and corona was subsequently associated with the disease. Therefore, distinct languages could have created the same words independently.Footnote ⁵ In addition, if the other element of the compound is a well established borrowing itself from English as German Babys (dated to the second half of the 19^th century) or boom (here implicitly associated with baby boom) in Corona-Babys and coronaboom, respectively, its adaptation from English models (coronababies and coronaboom) can be questioned.Footnote ⁶ The dates of attestations of these neologisms in the different languages, however, seem to support the first possibility, that is, that they are calques on English models since they are attested later in other languages than in English. The unmediated English origin of direct, unadapted, borrowings like coronials, playing with corona + millennials, poses little doubt. Similarly, there are some words that look like English but do not exist in that language, known as ‘false Anglicisms’ or ‘Pseudo-English’ (see, e.g., Furiassi, Reference Furiassi2003; Furiassi & Gottlieb, Reference Furiassi and Gottlieb2015), such as quarenteners, broadly meaning ‘someone quarantining’ in languages like Portuguese or Spanish.

All these neologisms can be broadly categorised according to their components: under the aforementioned covid are also covidials ‘babies born in an expected baby boom in late 2020’ and covideoparty ‘a video party during lockdown’ and under corona, coronials (same meaning as covidials), coronacation, used ironically to refer to the forced ‘holidays’ during quarantine, corona trolls, and morona or moronavirus (moron + corona/coronavirus), synonyms for covidiots; to that list of recurrent stems we can also add quarantine (e.g. quaranteens ‘teenagers who have experienced the coronavirus pandemic’), quarintini ‘a cocktail during lockdown (based on the word martini)’, quarantipple ‘a drink taken while in quarantine’ and Zoom (zoom-bombing, ‘hijacking a Zoom meeting’; zumping ‘breaking up on Zoom’), as well as other individual creations related to drinks like locktail (lockdown + cocktail). Not all of the listed forms have been borrowed into other languages (at least yet), but their presence seems to be expanding. That is the case for all the recent names for breaking up on different platforms (see, apart from zumping, FaceTumping [FaceTime + dumping] and Skumping [Skype + dumping])Footnote ⁷, which have been the subject of articles in several languages, including French (see ‘confinement et rupture amoureuse: la tendance est au “Zumping”’ [Doctissimo, 2020]).

Besides the patent productivity of blending, compounding (e.g. in coronababies), a crucial device throughout the history of English – especially in Old English – still proves to be popular in the coinage of new concepts. All of these new lexical items play with existing words, their sounds, and resonance, and they highlight the profound interrelation between language and society. The power of words in encapsulating the ethos of the current situation, without conveying its tragedy but a more cheerful spirit, is here demonstrated. These terms may fall out of use in the future even if some are already in online dictionaries (see Macmillan Dictionary, s.v. drivecation ‘time spent in your caravan or camper van parked at home during lockdown’), but at the moment they serve their purpose, contributing to putting names to new realities and psychologically processing and enduring these unprecedented times globally.