I've been looking around at the words of the year and unsurprisingly a lot of them are about the pandemic. MW has gone for "vaccine" while Oxford has chosen the shorter form "Vax" which were predictable enough. Meanwhile in Australia Macquarie has gone for the more colourful "strollout" referring to the slow rollout of the vaccine program there. Nor is it restricted to English. In the Netherlands they have chosen Pritspijt which apparently means "vaccine regret" referring to the rather inexplicable wish that you hadn't taken the vaccine. Meanwhile in Germany they have gone for a new meaning of Wellenbrecher which is literally wave-breaker or breakwater but has the extended metaphorical meaning of the actions taken against COVID.
Of course not all dictionaries have gone the same way. Malaysia News had a poll on various Chinese words and ended up with "pan" which means "hope" while "kin", the word chosen in Japan, means "gold". Cambridge have chosen "perseverance" which makes sense but a couple of the others are ones I find a bit baffling. What, for example, exactly is an NFT (Non fungible token) which was the Collins selection? I have had it explained to me and looked it up on the internet but I am no wiser. Rather like bitcoin I am unable to see exactly how something that doesn't - in any real sense - exist can have any value. I also found that there is apparently a Sparkling Wine WotY which is Asolando but I have too little interest in wine to be bothered to look it up. Finally there is the equally puzzling "allyship" from Dictionary.com which I initially read as "alleyship" briefly causing me to ponder how a ship can sail down an alley before noticing my error and concluding that it must be a neoligism meaning "the quality of being an ally".

I suppose I should choose my own and it's a toss up between "isolation" and "uncertainty". "Isolation" not because of the pandemic but because of my move to a city where I don't know anyone in circumstances where I am unlikely to get to know anyone. "Uncertainty" because every ex-pat in China feels it at the moment with all the changes there have recently been in regulations regarding teaching here. I think, on balance, that I'll go with "uncertainty".

Good idea, Bob. I think we should all choose our own words of the year. I am surprised in U.S. dictionaries there is nothing about "insurrection." That would be my choice.

The weirdest is vaccine regret. I haven't even heard that here. Mostly, I've heard regrets that people haven't had the vaccine.