The Words of the Week - Feb. 7

‘Genre’

Lookups for genre rose following Beyoncé’s acceptance speech for Best Country Album at this year’s Grammy Awards. The album—Cowboy Carter—also won Album of the Year.

Beyoncé took home the award for Best Country Album at the 2025 Grammy Awards. Cowboy Carter is also up for Album of the Year at this year’s ceremony. … “I was not expecting this,” she began her acceptance speech. She thanked the country artists who contributed to the album as well as her family; husband Jay-Z and eldest daughter Blue Ivy were both in the audience. “I think genre is a code word to keep us in our place as artists,” she continued. “I just want to encourage people to do what they’re passionate about. Stay persistent.”
— Brittany Spanos, Rolling Stone, 3 Feb. 2025

We define the relevant sense of genre as “a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content.” Genre, as you might guess from the way it sounds, comes straight from French, a language based on Latin. It’s closely related to genus, a word you may have encountered in biology class. Both words contain the gen- root because they indicate that everything in a particular category (a genre or a genus) belongs to the same “family” and thus has the same origins.

‘Ethnic cleansing’

Lookups for ethnic cleansing spiked following remarks made by President Donald Trump during a press conference on Tuesday night.

Campaigners are set to march to the US Embassy in London to demand freedom for Palestine amid Donald Trump’s comments on a Gaza ethnic cleansing plan. The demonstration, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), is set to be held on Saturday, February 15. It comes after US President Trump effectively endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in a shock announcement where he said the US would “take over” Gaza and “own it.” Trump told a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Gaza could become the “Riviera of the Middle East” while refusing to rule out sending US troops to occupy the territory.
— Laura Pollack, The National (Scotland), 5 Feb. 2025

Ethnic cleansing is the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity. It is considered a war crime.

‘Doge’

Doge saw a spike in lookups this week, and has been trending upward for the past few months.

The Trump administration has removed two top security officials at the US Agency for International Development after they refused to let representatives of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” access restricted spaces at the agency on Saturday, said current and former USAID officials. A group of about eight DOGE officials entered the USAID building Saturday and demanded access to every door and floor, despite only a few of them having security clearance, according to senior Senate Democratic staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the incident.
— John Hudson and Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post, 2 Feb. 2025

We define doge as “a chief magistrate in the republics of Venice and Genoa.” While we applaud anyone curious about or studying Venetian and/or Genovese history, we suspect the word’s high lookups are due to the “government efficiency” task force referenced in the above quote, which we do not currently define. Doge is also used as an intentional misspelling of dog (in reference to an Internet meme involving a picture of a Shiba Inu dog captioned with humorously ungrammatical phrases), and in reference to a cryptocurrency. You can learn more about these evolving uses in this handy explainer.

‘Potash/Tariff’

More people than usual looked up potash this week, likely in connection to tariffs imposed (and then postponed) on Canada by President Donald Trump, and tariffs imposed on the United States by Canada in response (also postponed). Lookups for tariff were also, understandably, high.

“It will have real consequences for you, the American people,” Trudeau said. “As I have consistently said, tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities. It will raise costs for you, including food at the grocery store and gas at the pump.” A trade war will also, Trudeau said, “impede” access to affordable materials currently sourced from Canada and crucial to U.S. national security, “such as nickel, potash, uranium, steel and aluminum.”
— Matthew Medsger, The Boston Herald, 3 Feb. 2025

Trump tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China would cost the typical household about $1,200 per year, [Kimberly] Clausing and her colleague Mary Lovely found in a new analysis. The good news is that Trump’s planned tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been delayed for a month. But the tariffs on China went into effect Tuesday morning, and China immediately retaliated with tariffs on US energy and metals. That burden falls disproportionately on those who can least afford it: The tariffs on America's biggest three trading partners will wipe out 2.7% of the income of the bottom 20% of earners, the Peterson Institute found. “That's a big hit if you’re living paycheck to paycheck,” Clausing said.
— Matt Egan, CNN, 4 Feb. 2025

Potash can refer either to potassium carbonate as derived especially from wood ashes, or to potassium (or a potassium compound) especially as used in agriculture or industry. We provide a range of meanings for tariff, including “a schedule of duties imposed by a government on imported or in some countries exported goods,” “a schedule of rates or charges of a business or a public utility,” and “price, charge.” Tariff came into English at the end of the 16th century, borrowed from the Italian tariffa, which itself came from the Arabic word taʽrīf, meaning “notification.”

‘Coup’

Lookups for coup have also been notably high this week, and at times the word was the number one lookup.

Congressional Democrats and public policy experts are sounding the alarm about a government “coup” led by Elon Musk—an effort that is being aided by cyber experts with Bay Area connections, including from Stanford and UC Berkeley. Musk’s allies have gained access to classified federal government data and trillions in taxpayer dollars, and there is little that Democrats can unilaterally do to stop it. … “Elon Musk was not elected by the American people and should be nowhere near our Treasury payments system,” said [Rep. Robert] Garcia, who is a member of the House Oversight Committee. “Our Social Security, Medicare benefits and private information are off-limits, and it’s insane that the world’s richest man is being given access to our records.”
— Joe Garofoli, The San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Feb. 2025

Coup is a shortening of coup d’etat, itself defined as “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics; especially, the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” Coup d’etat is a French expression that literally means “stroke of state,” with “stroke” meaning “knock” or “blow.”

Word Worth Knowing: ‘Ahabian’

Ahabian is an adjective in our Unabridged dictionary that describes things related to or characteristic of either of two well-known Ahabs, namely a king of Israel in the ninth century BCE and especially the whaleboat captain in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick who obsessively pursues a white whale. Ahabian is not a terribly common descriptor, but it is useful in a pinch to describe someone (or someone’s behavior) as being self-destructive in a single-minded and unreasonable pursuit of a goal. If you’re interested in learning some unusual words featured in Moby-Dick, we think you’ll enjoy this article on nine of them. All are great; one is offal.

Wrestling with great white whales is neither a humble nor a risk-free sport. As a manual on the subject called “Moby-Dick” points out, the activity requires obsession, determination and the sort of gods-defying arrogance of which tragedies are made. These are, of course, traits identified with Herman Melville’s vengeful Captain Ahab; they also apply to Orson Welles, the brilliant director and actor who decided with Ahabian hubris to put “Moby-Dick” on a London stage in the mid-1950’s.
— Ben Brantley, The New York Times, 27 July 1999