The Words of the Week - Aug. 15
Dictionary lookups from Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C.
‘Meteorite’
Lookups for meteorite saw a bump coinciding with news about a very old meteorite that struck a house in Georgia in June. Meteor was also looked up more than usual this week due to the annual Perseid meteor shower.
A cherry tomato-sized fireball that crashed through the roof of a metro Atlanta house in June was a meteorite 20m years older than Earth, a scientist has determined. In a news release on Friday, University of Georgia planetary geologist Scott Harris said that he arrived at that conclusion after examining 23 grams of fragments from a meteorite that were provided to him after the space rock pierced a man’s home and dented its floor in the Henry county community of McDonough. Harris subsequently looked at the fragments under microscopes and established that they came from a meteorite which formed 4.56bn years earlier. Experts estimate the Earth is roughly 4.54bn years old.
—Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian (London), 11 Aug. 2025
Meteorite refers to a meteor that reaches the surface of the earth without being completely vaporized. We define the relevant sense of meteor as “any of the small particles of matter in the solar system that are directly observable only by their incandescence from frictional heating on entry into the atmosphere.” Both meteorite and meteor are contrasted with meteoroid, which refers to a meteor particle without relation to the phenomena it produces when entering the earth’s atmosphere.
‘Coke’
A deadly explosion at a steel facility in Pennsylvania drove higher-than-usual lookups for coke.
A U.S. Steel plant south of Pittsburgh exploded Monday morning, killing one person, trapping several people under rubble and injuring dozens, authorities said. In addition to the person killed, at least two others were unaccounted for following the explosion at Clairton Coke Works on the Monongahela River, according to Allegheny County officials. Local leaders cautioned it was still an “active scene” with a search and rescue operation.
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We define coke as “the residue of coal left after destructive distillation and used as fuel” as well as “a similar residue left by other materials (such as petroleum) distilled to dryness.”
‘Deploy’
Deploy became a top word of the week after President Trump’s announcement that he would deploy the National Guard in Washington D.C.
President Trump significantly escalated his efforts to exert federal authority over the nation’s capital on Monday, saying that he was temporarily taking control of the city’s police department and deploying 800 National Guard troops to fight crime there. At a White House news conference, the president painted a dystopian picture of Washington—including “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth”—that stood in sharp contrast to official figures showing violent crime in the city is at a 30-year low.
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We define several senses of the verb deploy including “to place in battle formation or appropriate positions” and “to spread out, utilize, or arrange for a deliberate purpose.” The word is a borrowing of the French déployer, meaning “to unfurl, spread out, display, arrange for a purpose.”
‘Showgirl’
Lookups for showgirl were high after the announcement of a new Taylor Swift album whose title includes the word.
The Life of a Showgirl will mark Swift’s 12th studio album and follow-up to 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department and its extended edition, The Anthology. It’s currently available to pre-order on her website, though a formal release date has yet to be shared.
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We define showgirl as “a chorus girl in a musical comedy or nightclub show,” and chorus girl as “a young woman who sings or dances in the chorus of a theatrical production (such as a musical or revue).” If you are interested in words that appear in Taylor Swift’s lyrics, in addition to album titles, we’ve got you covered.
Word Worth Knowing: ‘Cedilla’
The cedilla ( ̧ ) is the diacritical mark that is placed under the letter 'c,' as in the spelling of the words façade and garçon, to indicate that the letter is to be pronounced \s\, rather than \k\. Cedilla is from the name of the obsolete Spanish letter 'ç' and is a diminutive form of ceda, itself from zeda, which once denoted the letter 'z.' In fact, the 'ç' was used as a form of 'z' in the Middle Ages. In Late Latin, that letter was referred to as zeta. Other words featuring the cedilla include soupçon and aperçu.
