From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishpandemicpan‧dem‧ic /pænˈdemɪk/ noun [countable] technicalMI a disease that affects people over a very large area or the whole world → endemic, epidemic the AIDS pandemic —pandemic adjective
Examples from the Corpus
pandemic• Nobody guessed that such a rare disease would become a pandemic.• Not the real thing, of course, but rather a pandemic of stories about anarchists and conspiracies and such.• One final, explosive question remains: Why did a virus that was once so rare suddenly burst into a global pandemic?• And history teachers could set their pupils researching the influenza pandemic of 1918, a grim but fascinating topic.• Jasper and I stopped playing in 1982, before the pandemic was well along, before the virus had been isolated.• It has backfired because those worst hit by the pandemic, black people, are paying the price.• The intelligence estimate portrays the pandemic as the bad side of globalisation.• Clearly it was just an accident of history, a fluke, a momentary incursion of an otherwise universal pandemic.Origin pandemic (1600-1700) Greek pandemos, from pan- ( → PAN-) + demos “people” 