Where does the word “pandemic” come from?

I’m sure you’ve come across “pan” in words before and consciously or intuitively realized that it means “all” — everyone’s been to a pan-asian restaurant right?

Now for “dem” — well think about where else you’ve seen this and you’ll quickly realize it means “people”; think “demographic” and “democracy,” for example.

So pandemic then literally just denotes “all people,” which in and of itself doesn’t sound like a bad thing. In fact, the word is both an adjective and a noun; when used as an adjective, it simply means “occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population.” My guess is it was most often used with diseases especially a century ago at the time of the Spanish flu, causing the noun alone to signify a pandemic disease. But online dictionaries do also show you can say “pandemic fear”, for example, to use it as an adjective. On that note, I hope for “pandemic strength and compassion” as we get through this together.