Trending: ‘seriatim’

Lookups spiked 30,000% on October 26th, 2018

Why are people looking up seriatim?

In a press conference regarding the string of mail bombs sent to prominent Democrats, FBI Director Chris Wray mentioned the relatively obscure term seriatim:

Each of the devices was being brought through what are called total containment vehicles to our lab, and they were coming kinda seriatim.

https://twitter.com/heathershorn/status/1055902988831784962

What does seriatim mean?

As an adverb, seriatim has the legal definition "in a series : individually in a sequence." In general use, it means "in a series."

Where does seriatim come from?

Seriatim goes all the way back to the Latin series ("succession of persons or things"), which itself descends from serere ("to join, bind together").

Trend Watch is a data-driven report on words people are looking up at much higher search rates than normal. While most trends can be traced back to the news or popular culture, our focus is on the lookup data rather than the events themselves.