A Study of Semantic Change in the Word viral

Abstract: With diachronic corpus over the time periods, I selected a word that might be suitable for this type of study for detecting if potential semantic changes have occurred. In this study, I explored the lexical semantics of the word viral to see if the World Wide Web (WWW) has influenced the word. This essay explores how the WWW influences word meaning within a language. The present study has been done in two parts. The first part was done by collecting and comparing definitions from four different dictionaries: The Oxford English Dictionary 1933/1961, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology 1966, Compact Oxford Dictionary of Current English 2002, and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2018. Four different dictionaries were used to collect definitions that occurred during different periods; for example, two were used before the appearance of the WWW, one was used after the appearance of WWW, and the last dictionary was used to display the definition of contemporary English. The second part was done by corpus analysis. Two different corpora were used for this study: The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COCA). Corpora were used to look through the word viral and to provide a useful source of how a particular word is used within language. The results showed that the principal definition of the word viral had obtained additional definitions within language, a definition related to Internet terminology.