COVID-19 Related Expressions and Their Correlation with the Pandemic: An Internet-Based Study

At the end of 2019, a new type of coronavirus (coronavirus disease 2019, COVID-19, also known as severe special infectious pneumonia) broke out worldwide. This novel outbreak, with many mutations, was unanticipated and caused panic throughout the global community. Simultaneously, people’s lives were flooded with information related to the epidemic; specifically, words highly related to the epidemic were frequently used, such as “que4zhen3ren2shu4”, “qian2fu2qi2”, “yi4miao2”, and other sociological words, such as “she4jiao1ju4li2”, “ge2li2”. This study focuses on 2020 when COVID-19 caused drastic social changes, and uses the words identified by the World Health Organization to explore collocations that appear frequently due to the epidemic and their relationship with disease names. By collecting the names of COVID-19 diseases commonly used by relevant newspapers and media, the usage frequency over time is analyzed, and possible explanations will be explored. In addition, the high-frequency corpus generated through this research can also be helpful for further research. Furthermore, textbook writers can also refer to the research results to compile themed textbooks to facilitate the further understanding of the use of vocabulary in various countries. Chinese teachers can begin with high-frequency corpus and words, arrange appropriate course content for learners, and enable learners to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on the world through thematic learning.