NEOLOGISMS OF COVID ERA

This article is an attempt to analyze English neologisms that appeared in the language during the COVID-19 era. The authors examined a series of English-language publications, presented on open-access public domains such as BBC News, The Conversation, Business Mirror, The Economic Times, as well as Glossary on the COVID-19 pandemic, published on the website of the Government of Canada. The chronological scope of the study lies within April 2020 – February 2021. The analyzed glossary included 143 lexical units. The authors conducted content analysis, which helped to reveal five main groups of neologisms: neologisms that came into our speech from the limited use vocabulary; neologisms describing our new reality; neologisms formed by joining two lexical units with or without contamination; neologisms, which are phrases that either existed earlier, but experienced a semantic shift, or phrases that have appeared in the COVID era and are used to denote previously non-existent realities; neologisms formed by phonetic distortion of already existing words. The study showed that the most extensive groups of neologisms were those that have come from the limited use vocabulary, in particular from medical terminology, and neologisms describing a new reality, which include the very name of the virus (COVID or corona). It should be noted that neologisms that have come into general use from medicine require a special interpretation, since they are not always clearly understood by the recipients. Moreover, many neologisms, having arisen in English, have not got an adequate translation or analogue in the Russian language yet, therefore, these words require a further more careful study.