The Words of the Week - Nov. 21
Dictionary lookups from federal court, numismatics, and the night sky
‘Swat’
The verb swat was in the news after an Indiana state senator was swatted.
An Indiana state senator publicly castigated as a ‘RINO’ by President Donald Trump over redistricting was the target of a ‘swatting’ incident just hours later, according to local authorities.
—David Gilmour, Mediaite, 17 Nov. 2025
We define the verb swat as “to make a false report of an ongoing serious crime in order to elicit a response from law enforcement (such as the dispatch of a SWAT unit).” The noun swatting refers to an act or instance of this.
‘Gerrymander’
Texas’s new congressional maps were blocked by a federal court this week, resulting in a rise in lookups for gerrymander.
The three-judge federal court panel in El Paso said in a 2-1 decision that “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” ordering the state to revert to the maps it had drawn in 2021.
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Elbridge Gerry was a respected politician in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He signed the Declaration of Independence, served as governor of Massachusetts (1810-1811), and was elected vice president under James Madison. While governor, he tried to change the shape of voting districts to help members of his political party get elected. His system resulted in some very oddly shaped districts, including one (Gerry’s home district) that looked a little like a newt. Upon seeing a map of the bizarre regional divisions, a member of the opposing party drew feet, wings, and a head on Gerry’s district and said “That will do for a salamander!” Another member called out “Gerrymander!” Thus gerrymander became a term for such political schemes. We define the verb gerrymander as “to divide or arrange (a territorial unit) into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage.”
‘Numismatic’
A story about the American Numismatic Society moving from New York City to Toledo, Ohio, prompted a rise in lookups for the word numismatic.
Wartenberg Kagan, a scholar of ancient Greek coinage, left the British Museum in 1998 to join the American Numismatic Society and someday establish a proper money museum where one belonged, in the city of Wall Street. But exorbitant costs and space constraints conspired against those plans, as did an apparent indifference to the charms of numismatics. So: Hello, Toledo!
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We define two senses of numismatic: “of or relating to numismatics” (the study or collection of coins, tokens, paper money, etc.) and “of or relating to currency.” The word traces back through French to the Late Latin numisma, meaning “coin” or “coinage.”
‘Seditious’
Lookups for seditious rose sharply on Thursday after President Trump used the word.
Trump calls for arrest of ‘seditious’ Democrats who told troops their duty is to uphold the Constitution
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We define sedition as “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority” and seditious as “disposed to arouse or take part in or guilty of sedition” or “of, relating to, or tending toward sedition.”
Word Worth Knowing: ‘Asterism’
An asterism is a group of stars that form a pattern in the night sky. The term asterism does not now usually refer to a constellation but to a star pattern that makes up part of a constellation, or that includes stars from more than one constellation. It comes from the Greek verb asterizein, “to arrange in constellations.”
Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight, / the way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light. / Squint skyward and listen— / loving him, we move within his borders: / just asterisms in the stars’ set order.
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