Smittsomme koronaord

Abstract

Productive compounding contributes a lot to neology in Norwegian. This study investigates the use of new compounds with corona- or korona- occuring in online news articles in early 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic developed. Material from the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus was used in a quantitative analysis on a timeline. The vocabulary found to increase continually and strongly during several months, and the proportion of word types to tokens indicates a broadening of themes. After barely half a month the spelling changed from only corona- to mostly korona-.