This article examines neologisms that emerged in the Chinese language during the coronavirus pandemic. Any changes taking place in society are primarily reflected in social and political media, therefore, news publications in influential Chinese media (People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Guangming Daily) were selected as the research material because these sources enjoy the confidence among people. The aim of the research is to determine the building patterns and usage of neologisms that appeared during the period of 6–8 months since the pandemic outbreak. About 500 articles discussing coronavirus were analyzed in the course of the work, as a result, more than 30 neologisms were identified. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of 10 most frequent neologisms found in 289 contexts. It was discovered that compounding was the most frequent neologism-building pattern (60%), additional connotation acquisition turned out twice less frequent (30%), and the rarest pattern was homophony (10%).