A Complete Guide to Important Coronavirus-Related Words

A Complete Guide to Important Coronavirus-Related Words

Deciphering the terminology you're likely to hear

COVID-19:

COVID-19 is “a mild to severe respiratory illness that is caused by a coronavirus,” one that is characterized especially by fever, cough, and shortness of breath and may progress to pneumonia and respiratory failure. The name is an odd sort of acronym, insofar as it is formed from portions of two distinct words (COronaVIrus & Disease) and the latter portion of a date (the 19 from 2019). COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019.

Self-quarantine:

To self-quarantine is “to refrain from any contact with other individuals for a period of time (such as two weeks) during the outbreak of a contagious disease usually by remaining in one's home and limiting contact with family members.” The verb is fairly recent, showing evidence of use only within the past 20 years or so. The noun has been in occasional use prior to this in the 20th century.

Dr. Banks said further that the Federal authority invested in him in the matter of quarantine had not yet been exerted to its fullest, but that if persons continued to disregard his advice about self-quarantine, he would bring into service all of the power of compulsion at his command.

— The New York Times, 10 Aug. 1916 (p. 1)

Quarantine is currently most often found with the meaning of “a restraint upon the activities or communication of persons or the transport of goods designed to prevent the spread of disease or pests.” The word has a number of other meanings, both archaic and current, many of which have to do with a period of 40 days (it may be traced back to the Latin word quadraginta, meaning “forty”), including a 40 day period during which a widow was permitted by law to remain in her deceased husband's principal home without having to pay rent to his heirs, a period of 40 days set aside for penance or fasting (in early Christian church use), or a general period of 40 days set aside for a variety of uses.

One grand inconvenience attended on this army of Pilgrimes: For when their quarantine, or fourty dayes service, was expited, (the term the Pope set them to merit Paradise in) they would not stay one whit longer.

— Thomas Fuller, The historie of the holy warre, 1647

Isolation & Self-isolation:

Isolation ultimately derives from the Latin word insula, meaning “island.” The word’s path from Latin to English begins with the Italian derivative of insula, isolato (“isolated”), that became the French word isolé, and then moved into English. Early uses of the term in English were spelled in the French manner with a conventional English modifier ending d as isolé’d before it settled as the spelling isolated.

The literal etymological meaning of the word isolated is islanded. (The first hospitals built in Italy to protect the general population from the sick in the 14th century were located on an island.) Given its Classical roots, isolated is a relatively new word in English, only dating to the late 1700s. A verb was subsequently coined to correspond to this adjective, which is how we got isolate in English through the process of back-formation.

We date self-isolation to 1834 and a passage from The Metropolitan Magazine. In contrast to the use of the term in the context of today’s health crisis, this first known use of the term seems to make reference to being unaware of the events of the world around us:

Few, indeed, are they whose relations with actual life are compatible with a complete self-isolation from the interests and the passions fluctuating around them, and who can so effectually detach themselves from the tumultuous current of events which every day swells in its rapid course to the silent gulf of the past time.