Words We're Watching: (Figurative) 'Super-Spreader'

The ways that dictionaries define compound terms—those made up of more than one word—have evolved over the years. In general, however, one constant guiding principle for lexicographers goes as follows: if a compound term can be easily understood from the definitions of the individual parts of the term, then it needn’t have its own definition: a wine glass, for example, is a glass for wine. A bicycle helmet is a helmet worn while riding a bicycle. Cranberry juice is juice made from cranberries.

By contrast, opera glass and blue helmet are far from self-explanatory. And orange and juice are two words so commonly found next to each other that they merit the confirmation of a dictionary entry. (This last entry is a relatively recent one for us; the lack of space restrictions in an online dictionary is one of the reasons that such policies have evolved over time.)

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The Literal Usage of 'Super-Spreader'

It’s probable that most readers would understand the term super-spreader in context, and some subtleties (is it “one that excels at spreading” or “one that spreads a great amount”?) don’t interfere with understanding the general gist. We define it this way:

: an individual who is highly contagious and capable of transmitting a communicable disease to an unusually large number of uninfected individuals

This term, though by no means brand new, gained fast currency during the past year’s pandemic, and super-spreader was added to our online dictionary in the first weeks of the crisis. The term’s medical specificity and high frequency were good reasons to add it, even though it might have seemed self-explanatory in preceding years.

The Figurative Usage of 'Super-Spreader'

Another rationale for adding a compound term to the list of dictionary entries is the frequent use of a figurative meaning that is not self-explanatory: think of apple-pie when used to refer to something that seems typically American. When apple-pie refers to something that is not dessert, it requires a definition.

And, just as viral has gone from referring to diseases to referring to ideas, memes, stories, and social media postings, super-spreader is now also being used in contexts other than disease, to refer to someone or something that presents usually harmful ideas that are influential, shared widely, or often repeated. Unsurprisingly, this use is usually a pejorative one, referring to ideas that are not wholesome or (literally or figuratively) healthy. These uses have been around since before the pandemic:

The study's point is not that individuals with narrow thespian skills like Kim Kardashian and Honey Boo Boo do succeed, but rather that selfish, self-aggrandizing, vain people, aka narcissists, are over-represented on TV and social media-because they love drama, perform well in public and obsessively groom their image. Such personalities have been dubbed "super-spreaders" and are said to transmit narcissism like a virus.
— Jessica Seigel, Pacific Sun (Mill Valley, CA), 20 June 2014

It's also not a surprise that, like viral, this term is frequently found in contexts connected to social media:

As previously stated, certain Facebook users were more influential than others, and a subset of that group were "super spreaders" connected to other highly influential people.
— Misty Harris, Alaska Highway News (Fort St. John, BC), 9 Aug. 2012

These heavily connected nodes, sometimes referred to as super-spreaders in epidemic literature, play a crucial role in the severity of the epidemic spread. Due to the process by which new users prefer to connect with existing, popular users, a preferential attachment model might be more suited to replicating a Twitter network.
— Michael Piserchia, A statistical analysis and modeling of information diffusion across online social networks (Diss.), 2015

It's probably true that since the pandemic began, there has been an increase in this kind of usage. It stands to reason that a term that has become heavily used in its literal meaning become more frequently encountered in its figurative meaning:

Amid a hotly contested U.S. presidential election and the coronavirus pandemic, how is Facebook responding to criticism that the social media giant has become a superspreader of political and medical misinformation?
— USA Today, 23 Sept. 2020

But Trump has been a super-spreader in a different sense for many, many years—a super-spreader of disinformation.
— Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 3 October 2020

This will be Mr. Zuckerberg’s sixth appearance in front of Congress, and the 36-year-old is now well accustomed to making a pitch about how his social network—the world’s largest—is a force for good. Forget that Facebook is a veritable superspreader of disinformation and confusion across the internet.
— Mike Isaac, The New York Times, 17 November 2020

And not just her, of course, but everything she's touched: two other producers jumped ship from "Trickster" shortly after Latimer's resignation, properly concluding that the whole show has become a super-spreader of cancel-culture cooties.
— National Post (Toronto, Canada), 29 December 2020

Words We're Watching talks about words we are increasingly seeing in use but that have not yet met our criteria for entry.