Lexical innovations in times of health crisis: a study on vocabulary crossings created during the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

In this text, our main goal is to describe and analyze the lexical creations through vocabulary crossing that occurred or were widely disseminated between March 2020 and December 2022, the period in which the covid-19 pandemic occurred. We seek to identify the main motivations for each one, as well as check if they are still active today. We also intend to discuss the social and cultural factors that motivated these innovations, highlighting the close relationship between new words and social transformations. The main objective of the text is to confirm the ephemeral nature of such formations, showing that most are extremely dated and ultimately did not take hold, becoming true linguistic fossils. Since many neologisms are, in fact, ephemeral, we have chosen to provide lexicographical entries for each intersection presented in the article in order to give the reader a broader definition of the constructions created at the time by this important word-formation process.