雅思天天练，牛津大辞典教您灵活运用疫情用语（上）

随着新冠病毒在全球声势浩大的蔓延，牛津大辞典也增加了一些新的词汇和表达用语，鞍山际丰出国留学经过精心的整理，分为上下两期，为准备考雅思的同学们提供最新的材料，希望对同学们能有所帮助。

With terms such as WFH, social distancing and self-isolation now in common parlance, the Oxford English Dictionary has made an extraordinary update to include COVID-19 and words related to the pandemic in its definitive record of the English language.

如今，随着居家办公（WFH: work from home）、社交隔离和自我隔离等词汇成了日常用语，《牛津英语词典》进行了一次非同寻常的更新，将新型冠状病毒肺炎以及与这一流行病相关的词汇收录进其权威英语语料库中。

The dictionary’s executive editor Bernadette Paton said that it was “a rare experience for lexicographers to observe an exponential rise in usage of a single word in a very short period of time, and for that word to come overwhelmingly to dominate the global discourse, even to the exclusion of most other topics”.”

《牛津英语词典》执行主编伯纳黛特·帕顿表示，“对于词典编纂者而言，一个单词的使用频率在极短时间内呈现指数式的增长，并在国际舆论中压倒性地占据支配地位，甚至使得其他大多数话题不再被讨论，这是十分罕见的。”

COVID-19 has done that, and has thus been added as a new entry in the OED, where it is described as “an acute respiratory illness in humans caused by a coronavirus, which is capable of producing severe symptoms and death, esp. in the elderly and others with underlying health conditions”.

新冠肺炎就是这样一个词，并因此被收录进了《牛津英语词典》。在字典里，它的定义是“一种由冠状病毒引起的急性人类呼吸道疾病，能够引起重症甚至死亡，对于老年人和基础病患者尤其如此”。

“As something of a departure, this update comes outside of our usual quarterly publication cycle,” said Paton. “But these are extraordinary times, and OED lexicographers, who like many others are all working from home … are tracking the development of the language of the pandemic and offering a linguistic and historical context to their usage.”

帕顿说：“这算是破了例，这次更新没有按照我们以往的周期性季度更新进行。但现在是非常时期，《牛津英语词典》的编纂者和其他许多人一样，只能居家办公，我们在跟踪新冠肺炎疫情期间语言的发展，并为这些词汇的用法提供语言学和历史语境。”

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