The Words of the Week - Nov. 14
Dictionary lookups from textiles, the night sky, and Veterans Day
‘Veteran’
Veteran was a top lookup this week, as Tuesday was Veterans Day.
Gonzales, of the National Association for Black Veterans, was among hundreds of people with 150 organizations, both military- and community-based, who marched down Main Street in downtown Auburn for the city's 60th annual Veterans Parade.
—Caitlyn Freeman, The Seattle Times, 10 Nov. 2025
We define the relevant sense of veteran as “a former member of the armed forces.” Veteran can also sometimes refer to an old soldier of long service, or to a person of long experience usually in some occupation or skill (such as politics or the arts). The word traces back to the Latin adjective veteranus, meaning “old, of long experience.”
‘Corduroy’
Corduroy Day was also on Tuesday (November 11 was chosen for the yearly day because “11/11” resembles the fabric’s wales), which may explain the uncommon rise in lookups for the word corduroy.
I was there in my best corduroy jacket and shined penny loafers …
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Corduroy typically refers to a durable usually cotton pile fabric with vertical ribs or wales. As a plural noun, it also often refers to trousers of corduroy fabric (as in “wore a pair of corduroys”). Corduroy can also mean “logs laid side by side transversely to make a road surface.” As for the word’s origin, it is obscure. It has been hypothesized that corduroy is a compound of cord, as the name for a fabric, and duroy, a coarse woolen fabric, but cord in this sense does not appear to have been in use before corduroy appeared. Advertisements in 1774 issues of the Boston Gazette and Country Journal have cord, corduroy, duroy, as well as cordesoy and cordusoy (perhaps by association with padusoy, variant of paduasoy) in lists of fabrics for sale. The notion that corduroy is from French corde du roi, “king’s cord,” is fanciful.
‘Aurora borealis’
The northern lights lit up the sky even as far south as Florida on Tuesday, leading to a rise in lookups for aurora borealis.
The northern lights made an appearance around Puget Sound on Tuesday evening, as a geomagnetic storm swirled across the Northern Hemisphere and dipped south of the Canadian border. … Colorful lights of the aurora borealis become visible when the sun ejects energy toward the Earth.
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Aurora borealis, also called northern lights, refers to an aurora that occurs in the earth’s northern hemisphere. It comes from New Latin, and translates directly to “northern dawn” (aurora australis refers to an aurora in the southern hemisphere and translates to “southern dawn”). Aurora refers to a luminous phenomenon that consists of streamers or arches of light appearing in the upper atmosphere of a planet’s magnetic polar regions; the phenomenon is caused by the emission of light from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along the planet’s magnetic field lines.
‘Inflation’
Inflation has featured prominently in many news stories over the past couple weeks.
[Fed Chair Jerome] Powell said the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee is deeply divided over whether to reduce its key rate, partly because the economy's health is unusually cloudy right now. The government has missed two monthly jobs reports and the October inflation data, scheduled to be published Thursday, will likely never be issued.
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The relevant sense of inflation here is “a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services.” The word’s initial meaning, one that is still very much in use, was “an act of inflating or a state of being inflated.” Inflation may be traced in part to the Latin verb flare (meaning “to blow”), a root it shares with a number of other English words, including flatulent.
‘Boondoggle’
Lookups for boondoggle rose this week following a news story in the Wall Street Journal.
[FBI Director Kash] Patel hit the news for taking an FBI plane to attend a wrestling event where his girlfriend, a country western singer, performed, and then to her home in Nashville. … After that, Patel visited a Texas hunting resort called the Boondoggle Ranch, according to flight records and people familiar with the trip, which hasn’t been previously reported.
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Boondoggle was coined in 1928 by Robert H. Link, a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts of America, to name the braided leather cords made and worn by scouts. Over time, it developed the additional sense defined as “a wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft.”
Word Worth Knowing: ‘MacGyver’
Angus MacGyver, as portrayed by actor Richard Dean Anderson in the titular, action-packed television series MacGyver, was many things—including a secret agent, a Swiss Army knife enthusiast, and a convert to vegetarianism—but he was no MacGuffin (a character that keeps the plot in motion despite lacking intrinsic importance). In fact, so memorable was this man, his mullet, and his ability to use whatever was available to him—often simple things, such as a paper clip, chewing gum, or a rubber band—to escape a sticky situation or to make a device to help him complete a mission, that people began associating his name with making quick fixes or finding innovative solutions to immediate problems. Hence the verb MacGyver, a slang term meaning to “make, form, or repair (something) with what is conveniently on hand.” After years of steadily increasing and increasingly varied usage following the show’s run from 1985 to 1992 (tracked in some detail here), MacGyver was added to our online dictionary in 2022.
When the Potts Point bistro became a vegetarian restaurant, diners reacted with a surge of gratitude. Anyone who has MacGyvered a “meal” from hot chips and garden salad at a place with no meat-free options will recognise why they responded with enthusiasm. Plant-based offerings can often be underwhelming (not another mushroom risotto!), if they exist at all.
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