We utilize a corpus-linguistic approach to examine the impact of prescriptivism on language usage. We have analyzed several prescriptive texts and compiled several monitor corpora, primarily consisting of publications from news websites, in order to trace the evolution of the Greek word variants for ‘coronavirus’ (κορονοϊός, κορωνοϊός, κορωναϊός, κοροναϊός) over the decade 2013-2023, as well as the gender usage (fem. vs. masc.) of the neologism ‘COVID-19’ (and its variants: ‘COVID’, ‘κόβιντ’, etc.), introduced in 2020. Our analysis reveals a significant prescriptive influence on the usage of the ‘coronavirus’ variants, while the influence on ‘COVID’ was rather limited.
