Fig 2. Top 20 (of 1,000) 1-grams for our top 12 languages for the first three weeks of April 2020 relative to a year earlier.

Our intent is to capture 1-grams that are topically and culturally important during the COVID-19 pandemic. While overall, we see pandemic-related words dominate the lists across languages, we also find considerable specific variation. Words for virus, quarantine, protective equipment, and testing show different orderings (note that we do not employ stemming). Unrelated 1-grams but important to the time of April 2020 are in evidence; the balance of these are important for our understanding of how much the pandemic is being talked about. To generate these lists we use the allotaxonometric method of rank-turbulence divergence to find the most distinguishing 1-grams (see Sec. Selection of languages and n-grams, Fig 1, and Dodds et al. [26]).