The word "Perseverance" has been looked up more than 243,000 times on the Cambridge Dictionary Website and named as the Word of the Year in 2021.
Defined by the dictionary as ‘continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time’, the word’s stellar performance this year may have as much to do with NASA as the pandemic. A spike of 30,487 searches for perseverance occurred between 19–25 February 2021, after NASA’s Perseverance Rover made its final descent to Mars on 18 February.
Cambridge Dictionary is the top website in the world for learners of English, and perseverance is not a common word for students of English to have in their vocabulary. We often see spikes in lookups of words associated with current events when those words are less familiar.”
In the following months, however, perseverance continued to be looked up more frequently on the site than ever before.
Further evidence that words looked up on Cambridge Dictionary often reflect world events is that in January searches for insurrection, impeachment, inauguration and acquit all spiked as the world closely followed the US presidential election.
In 2020, ‘quarantine’ defeated 'lockdown' and 'pandemic' to be crowned Word of the Year, attracting more than 183,000 views.
Source: www.cam.ac.uk
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