The Terms, they are A-Changing: How Merriam-Webster Redefined Vaccine Because of COVID-19

Flashback to spring 2021, just after President Biden took office, discussions regarding the promising solution of a vaccine to resolve COVID were on the rise. These conversations outlined the benefits of getting a vaccine, who was eligible, and what those who are vaccinated can do that those without the vaccine should not do.

These boundary-based ideas for promoting the shot, sparked curiosity to answer the question, what is the difference between immunization, inoculation, and vaccination? 

When a friend asked, “did you get your vaccine, yet?” I simply answered, “I’ve been inoculated.” Which meant I had been exposed and recovered from COVID-19.

Side note for clarity: Inoculation is the broadest of the three terms and vaccine is the most specific, regarding how inoculation is achieved.

At the time, citizens at high risk of being severely impacted by the disease were recommended to get the vaccine and even highly awarded for doing so. An example is Colorado’s incentive for a 1 million dollar lottery prize to those who get a vaccine.

That lasted until the end of summer when President Biden and liberal Governors started applying the bit of requiring vaccines.

So it’s no surprise that on Monday, Merriam Webster announced the word of the year: Vaccine. 

Using algorithms to determine how many times a word is looked up on the internet, the dictionary determined that lookups for the definition of vaccine increased by about 600% in 2020 and more than 1,000% in 2021. 

According to Merriam-Webster, “the promising medical solution to the pandemic that upended our lives in 2020 also became a political argument and source of division. The biggest science story of our time quickly became the biggest debate in our country, and the word at the center of both stories is vaccine.”

In May 2021, Merriam-Webster revised and expanded its entry for the word because the pharmacies had come up with a new way of creating the vaccine, which changes how humans build immunity based on the medication.

The definition, which formerly read “a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that it is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease,” was replaced with the following:

1. a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease: such as:
   1. an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin)
   2. a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)

By the way, according to Merriam-Webster, Vaccine comes from the Latin word for “cow,” Vacca, because the term was initially used to refer to inoculation using doses of cowpox that, it was discovered, protect humans against smallpox. This word is a relatively recent one in English, dating back to the 1880s.

To riff off of Bob Dylan, ‘the terms they are a-changin’.’

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