Hot off the press! Canadian Word Spy Paul McFedries was very quick off the mark to note this one, following on the heels of this winter’s polar vortex.

A “pollen vortex” is the high levels of spring pollen that are created when temperatures rise quickly following an extremely cold winter. Given the recency of “polar vortex,” it’s not surprising that the earliest citation McFedries found was just over a month ago on Twitter, tweeted by Marc Santia, a reporter for WNBC-TV in New York.

Since then, it’s appeared in Mother Jones magazine as well as the Washington Post.~TM