Covidinka, Hungarian for covidiot — Here is the dictionary of the COVID-19 pandemic

There is hardly any aspect of life that has not been impacted by COVID-19, and Ágnes Veszelszki’s new dictionary Karanténszótár is proof that the pandemic has also brought hundreds of new words into the Hungarian language.

Language is constantly evolving. This is especially true of words we use to describe the world around us, as it is very likely that we will find ourselves in situations we have never experienced before — which also brings the need to invent new words to describe these new situations.

But no phenomenon before has had such a huge impact on our vocabulary as the current COVID-19 pandemic. And there is no better proof than the fact that a dictionary containing all the COVID-related Hungarian terms has been just published in the country.

According to Qubit.hu, the book Karanténszótár (which translates as quarantine dictionary), edited by Hungarian linguist Ágnes Veszelszki, has a whopping number of 400 entries, describing words that sprang up in the Hungarian language between January and June 2020.

Veszelszki is an associate professor and head of the department of the Institute of Communication and Media Science at the Corvinus University of Budapest. As for the reasons behind this unprecedented increase in vocabulary, she explains that:

“The pandemic, the quarantine and the fact that our lives have remarkably slowed down or come to a complete halt put us in new situations we had absolutely no words for. It is these new extralinguistic phenomena that could explain such an increase in word creation.”

The translation of such a dictionary could be another exciting linguistic challenge, but — luckily for us — several expressions derive from words in the English language. For example, “covidinka” is equivalent to the English phrase covidiot, which is a blend of the words COVID and idiot. (Interestingly but maybe not so relevantly, the former is also very similar to another Hungarian word, kövidinka, which is a type of Hungarian wine grape.) The expression “home ovi” is a blend of the well-known home office and the word ovi, an informal Hungarian word for nursery school.