'Confinement', word of the year 2020 for the Fundéu
'Lockdown' 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 isolation and generally imposed by a population, a person or a group for health or security reasons', this term has marked a good part of the months of the year that now ends. The health crisis derived from the pandemic of the COVID-19 is, without a doubt, the protagonist of 2020 and the measures implemented to stop it have radically changed our way of living and speaking.
The Royal Spanish Academy, in its most recent update of the "Spanish dictionary" ("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 lived due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Likewise, 'confinement' is the best alternative to the Anglicized 'lockdown' to designate the forced confinement of the population in their homes.
The winner has been chosen from a list of 12 candidates in which were other words that have marked the year that ends. The list of candidates to speak for 2020 proposed by the FundéuRAE also included 'coronavirus',' infodemic ',' resilience ',' COVID-19 ',' telecommuting ',' conspiracy ',' (a) tiktok ',' statuephobia ',' pandemic ',' sanitary 'and' vaccine '.
This is the eighth time that the FundéuRAE has chosen, 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 'selfie' (2014), 'refugee' (2015), 'populism' (2016), 'aporophobia' (2017), 'microplastic' (2018) and emojis (2019).
