During the COVID-19 lockdown, physical isolation made digital communication a much larger part of everyday life. I wanted to understand what kind of vocabulary emerged in that period and how people expressed it through GIFs. Their short, looping format interested me because it can communicate a feeling quickly, often with humour or a recognisable cultural reference. The project was an experiment in reading that relationship between words and images, rather than a comprehensive account of pandemic communication. The research leaned towards English-speaking Western audiences, and Giphy introduced another layer of selection. Both limits mattered: the available images could suggest questions about a word's cultural associations, but could not establish how often people actually used it across social media.