Although we are still near the middle of the alphabet, albeit on the downhill side, people are noticing that Greek has two “O”s. The Psi variant will sound like “sigh” psychiatrists may need to revise the DSM to reflect its symptoms.įinally, here comes omega (ω). It is, after all, the first letter in “Christ,” and zealots may interpret a Chi variant as the Second Coming. Upsilon is followed by three letters whose order nobody can keep straight: phi (φ), chi (χ), and psi (ψ)-or is it chi, psi, and phi? Fie on the Phi variant. Just as the English alphabet groups the three crazy letters-“X,” “Y,” and “Z”-at the end, Greek saves some very special characters for last. They also skipped the next letter, xi (ξ), not because it looks so exotic, sitting there between “N” and “O,” but because Xi is a Chinese surname and, one cannot help but notice, the surname of the guy who runs China. They got to mu (μ), which is right in the middle, and then left out nu (ν), because it sounds confusingly like “new” we can’t go around talking about a new Nu variant of interest. If this seems to be happening too fast, it’s partly because scientists have skipped some letters. Having reached omicron (ο), we are already more than halfway through the alphabet. Although it was unlikely that, even with global warming, a single hurricane season could yield enough storms to run through both alphabets, the pandemic threatens to deplete our store of Greek in no time. During the pandemic, scientists with the World Health Organization are relying on Greek to make the variants of the coronavirus easier to talk about and to avoid associations with the names of places where the variants were initially detected for instance, the strain with the designation B.1.617.2, which was first identified in India, is popularly known as the Delta variant.
In recent years, we got as far as Hurricane Iota. What is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters? During hurricane season, if meteorologists use up the approved letters of the English alphabet, they have traditionally turned to Greek for naming storms. The highly contagious Omicron variant has broken through in more ways than one: the Greek alphabet has made it into the Style section. Send us feedback.An unusual side effect of the coronavirus is the regular appearance of the Greek alphabet in newspaper headlines. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'omicron.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Will Langhorne, Arkansas Online, 1 July 2022 The high prevalence of these omicron subvariants suggests Central Florida residents shouldn’t view vaccination or prior infection as a guarantee they won’t get infected.Ĭaroline Catherman, Orlando Sentinel, 23 June 2022 In the Northeast, where the omicron subvariants first took hold this spring, deaths climbed as cases surged.īenjamin Mueller,, 20 June 2022 See More Oregonlive, 2 July 2022 The rising case count is most likely due to the spread of the B.A.4 and B.A.5 omicron subvariants. Mark Murray, NBC News, 14 July 2022 Contagious omicron subvariants, particularly BA.5, are contributing to many of the cases in Arizona, according to results from sequencing labs.Īlison Steinbach, The Arizona Republic, 13 July 2022 Currently, the administration and the FDA are anticipating the rollout of next-generation, bivalent boosters this fall that would target both the ancestral strain and the BA.4/5 omicron subvariants.īeth Mole, Ars Technica, 12 July 2022 But with super infectious omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, that may not hold true any longer.ĭominic Fracassa, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 July 2022 Even now, that forecaster, Oregon Health & Science University’s Peter Graven, has delayed release of new projections by a week in part because of difficulty incorporating new omicron subvariants into the model.
Recent Examples on the Web That’s the two-week increase in the average daily Covid deaths and hospitalizations, per NBC’s data team, as new omicron subvariants continue to proliferate across the country.
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