Open Access

In the present contribution, I investigate if and how the English and French editions of the Wiktionary collaborative dictionary can be used as a corpus for real time neology watch. This option is envisaged as a stopgap, when no satisfactory corpus is available. Wiktionary can also prove useful in addition to standard corpus analysis, to minimize the risk of overlooking new coinages and new senses. Since the collaborative dictionary’s quest for exhaustiveness makes the manual inspection of the new additions unreasonable (more than 31,000 English lemmas and 11,000 French lemmas entered the nomenclature in 2020), identifying the possibly relevant headwords is an issue. The solution proposed here is to use Wiktionary revision history to detect the (new or existing) entries that received the greatest number of modifications. The underlying hypothesis is that the most heavily edited pages can help identify the vocabulary related to “hot topics”, assuming that, in 2020, the pandemic-related vocabulary ranks high. I used two measures introduced by Lih (2004), whose aim was to estimate the quality of Wikipedia articles: the so-called rigour (number of edits per page) and diversity (number of unique contributors per page). In the present study, I propose to adapt the rigour and diversity metrics to Wiktionary in order to identify the pages that generated a particular stir, rather than to estimate the quality of the articles. I do not subscribe to the idea that – in Wiktionary – more revisions necessarily produce quality articles (more revisions often produce complete articles). I therefore adopt Lih’s notion of diversity to refer to the number of distinct contributors, but leave out the name rigour when it comes to the number of revisions. Wolfer and Müller-Spitzer (2016) used the two metrics to describe the dynamics of the German and English editions of Wiktionary. One of their findings was that the number of edits per page is correlated with corpus word frequencies. The variation in number of page edits should therefore reflect to some extent the variation of corpus word frequencies. Renouf (2013) established a relationship between the fluctuation of word frequencies in a diachronic corpus and various neological processes. In particular, she illustrated how specific events generate sudden frequency spikes for words previously unseen in the corpus. For instance, Eyjafjallajökull, the – existing – name of an Icelandic glacier, appeared in the corpus when the underlying volcano erupted in 2010 and disrupted air traffic in Europe. In order to check if the same phenomenon occurs when using Wiktionary edits instead of corpus frequencies, I manually annotated the most frequently revised entries (according to various ranking scores) with the binary tag: “related to Covid-19” (yes/no). The annotations were then used to test the ability of various configurations to detect relevant headwords from the English and French Wiktionary, namely Covid-19 neologisms and related existing words that deserve updates.

This paper arises within the current communication urgency experienced throughout the pandemic. From its onset, several new lexical units have permeated the overall media discourse, as well as social media and other channels. These units convey information to the public regarding the ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ namely COVID-19. In addition to its worldwide impact healthwise, the pandemic generates noteworthy influence in the linguistic landscape, and as a result, a significant number of neologisms have emerged. Within the scope of our ongoing research, we identify the neologisms in European Portuguese that are related to the term COVID-19 via form or meaning. However, not all the new lexical units identified in our corpus containing COVID-19 in its formation can unequivocally be regarded as neoterms (terminological neologisms). Accordingly, this article aims not only to reflect on the distinction between neologism and neoterm but also to explore the determinologisation process that several of these new lexical units experience.

While adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world started to talk about the “new normal” way of life, and they conveyed feelings and thoughts on the topic through social networks and traditional communication channels resorting to a set of specific linguistic strategies, such as metaphors and neologisms. The vocabulary in different domains and in everyday speech was expanded to accommodate a complex social, cultural, and professional phenomenon of changes. Therefore, this new life gave birth to a new language – the “coronaspeak”. According to Thorne (2020), the “coronaspeak” has three stages: first, it emerged in the way medical aspects were communicated in everyday language; secondly, it occurred when speakers verbalized the experiences they had undergone and “invented their own terms”; finally, this “new” way of speaking emerged in the government and authorities’ jargon, to ensure that the new rules and policies were understood, and that population adopted socially responsible behaviours. In this paper, we will focus on the second stage, because we intend to take stock of how speakers communicate and verbalize this new way of living, particularly on social networks, for example. Alongside, we are interested in the context in which the neologism – be it a new word, a new meaning, or a new use – emerged, is used, and understood, through the observation of the occurrence of the new word(s) either on social networks or through dissemination texts (press) to confront it with the ones that Portuguese digital dictionaries have attested so far. Different criteria regarding the insertion of new units, the inclusion date, and the lexicographic description of the entries in the dictionaries will be debated.

This paper presents the main issues connected with the creation of a trilingual Hungarian-Italian-English dictionary of the COVID-19 pandemic using Lexonomy. My aim is not only to create a coronacorpus (in Hungarian, I propose my own corona-neologism or ‘coroneologism’: koronakorpusz) and a dictionary of equivalents, but also to understand how the different waves and phases of the COVID-19 pandemic are changing the Hungarian language, detect the Corona-, COVID-, pandemic-, virus-, mask-, quarantine-, and vaccine-related neologisms, and offer an overview of the most frequent or linguistically interesting Hungarian neologisms and multiword units related to COVID-19.

The aim of this work is to describe criteria used in the process of inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries of Spanish within the framework of pandemic instability. Our starting point will be data obtained by the Antenas Neológicas Network (https://www.upf.edu/web/antenas), whose representation in three different lexicographic tools will be analyzed with the purpose of identifying problems in the methodology used to dictionarize – that is, how and what words were selected to be included in dictionaries and how they were represented in their entries – neologisms during the COVID-19 pandemic (sources and corpora of analysis, selection criteria, types of definition, among other aspects). Two of them are monolingual and COVID-19 lexical units were included as part of their updates: the Antenario, a dictionary of neologisms of Spanish varieties, and the Diccionario de la Lengua Española [DLE], a dictionary of general Spanish, published by the Real Academia Española [RAE], Spanish Royal Academy). The other is a bilingual unidirectional English-Spanish dictionary first published as a glossary, Diccionario de COVID-19 EN-ES [TREMEDICA], entirely made up of neological and non-neological lexical units related to the virus and the pandemic. Thus, the target lexis was either included in existing works or makes up the whole of a new tool located in a portal together with other lexicographic tools. Unlike other collections of COVID-19 vocabulary that kept cropping up as the pandemic unfolded, all three have been designed and written according to well-established lexicographic practices. Our working hypothesis is that the need to record and define words which were recently created impacts the criteria for inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries about Spanish, including a certain degree of overlap of some features which are traditionally thought to be specific to each type of dictionary.