A Cross-Cultural Study of the Most Frequent Words in the News during COVID-19

Due to the global impact of the corona pandemic, covid-19-related news had become a top priority issue in the world news. this cross-cultural study aims to investigate the most common english and persian keywords that co-occurred with the collocates employed in the virus-related news. based on a 1,247,523-word corpus, this study examined how the news about covid-19 had evolved throughout 2021. a total of 2400 covid-19-related news, 1200 of which were in english and 1200 in persian were randomly selected from news agency websites and analyzed using antconc to determine the most recurrent keywords and their first collocations in both corpora. frequent keyword nouns, first collocation of these nouns, and frequent keyword verbs were explored to understand the most important public’s concerns that are reflected in news media. the results indicated what the most prevalent keyword nouns are and how they get along with collocates, besides the most recurrent keyword verbs during the pandemic in both corpora. this cross-cultural corpus-based descriptive and analytical study assists iranian medical students, teachers, and researchers by providing a comprehensive understanding of english words related to pandemics.