The Words of the Week - Oct. 17
Dictionary lookups from baseball, R&B, and Indigenous Peoples’ Day
‘Indigenous’
Indigenous trended sharply in lookups this week, as is now the case in early October every year; this is prompted by Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which falls on the second Monday of October.
“In 2021, Former President Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to formally recognize Indigenous Peoples Day. It’s time for Massachusetts to do the same. Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day is an act of respect, recognition, and reconciliation. It honors the first stewards of this land past, present, and future.”
—Jo Comerford, quoted in The Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun, 13 Oct. 2025
The relevant sense of indigenous is “of, relating to, or descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized.” When used in this manner the word is typically capitalized. Other meanings of indigenous (which are not usually capitalized) include “produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment" and “innate, inborn.” The word comes from the Latin noun indigena, meaning “native.” To learn more about English words that come from Indigenous languages, check out this article.
‘Visionary’
The death of musician D’Angelo this week led to an increase in lookups for visionary.
D’Angelo, Soul’s Modern Visionary, Dead at 51
—D’Angelo, the visionary singer and musician who blended R&B and soul in landmark albums such as “Brown Sugar" and "Voodoo,” mesmerizing critics and audiences even as he disappeared from public view for years at a time, died Oct. 14. He was 51.
—D’Angelo was one focal point in a constellation of musicians and occasional collaborators—Angie Stone, Erykah Badu, Raphael Saadiq, Questlove, J Dilla—who each strove to reconcile organic vintage soul and digital-forward hip-hop. Still, every one of his songs flaunted D’Angelo’s visionary individuality.
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We define the relevant senses of the adjective visionary as “having or marked by foresight and imagination” and the noun as “one having unusual foresight and imagination.”
‘Triskaidekaphobia’
More people than usual looked up triskaidekaphobia this week, perhaps due to October 13th falling on Monday.
The number 13 can be frightening to some regardless of the day of the week. Triskaidekaphobia, or the fear of the number 13, is so common that many high-rise buildings, hotels, and hospitals skip the 13th floor. Some airports do not have gates or baggage claims numbered 13, although a surprising amount still do.
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Triskaidekaphobia is, indeed, fear of the number 13. It’s impossible to say just how or when the number thirteen got its bad reputation. There are a number of theories, of course. Some say it comes from the Last Supper because Jesus was betrayed afterwards by one among the thirteen present. Others trace the source of the superstition back to ancient Hindu beliefs or Norse mythology. But if written references are any indication, the phenomenon isn’t all that old (at least, not among English speakers). Known mention of fear of thirteen in print dates back only to the late 1800s. By the early 1900s, however, it was prevalent enough to merit a name, which was formed by attaching the Greek word for “thirteen”—treiskaideka (dropping that first “e”)—to phobia (“fear of”).
‘Dumper’
Major League Baseball playoffs are responsible for an uptick in lookups for dumper, which forms part of the nickname of the Seattle Mariners’ all-star catcher, Cal Raleigh.
The Seattle Mariners outlasted the Detroit Tigers in an epic series-deciding Game 5 of the ALDS that took 15 innings to decide. … After the game, the 28-year-old [Cal] Raleigh who is known as the “Big Dumper” was overcome by emotion and relief with the series over.
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We define the relevant sense of dumper as “one that dumps.” Dumper is often used for a dump truck or for a device used for unloading freight cars by tilting or dumping. Considering that one of the meanings of the verb dump is “to get rid of (something) in an abrupt and often casual or careless way,” one might think that Raleigh earned his nickname for his habit of dumping baseballs over outfield fences (he hit 60 home runs during the 2025 regular season). One would be wrong, however—the true meaning behind his nickname involves, how shall we say this, his callipygian physique.
‘Remigrate’
Remigrate was a top lookup this week after it was posted on social media by the Department of Homeland Security, garnering controversy.
The Department of Homeland Security sparked backlash this week after it posted a single word, “Remigrate,” from its official X (formerly Twitter) account, linking to a government site promoting voluntary self-deportation. The post, which racked up over 5 million views, was seen by critics as a sign of the Trump administration’s growing embrace of far-right terminology to signal tougher immigration enforcement.
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Our Unabridged dictionary defines the verb remigrate as “to migrate again or back.”
Word Worth Knowing: ‘Pococurante’
The French writer Voltaire carefully named his characters in Candide (1759) to create allegories. He appended the prefix pan-, meaning “all,” to glōssa, the Greek word for “tongue,” to name his optimistic tutor “Pangloss,” a sobriquet suggesting glibness and talkativeness. Then there is the apathetic Venetian Senator Pococurante, whose name appropriately means “caring little” in Italian. Voltaire’s characters did not go unnoticed by later writers. Laurence Sterne used Poco-curante in part six of Tristram Shandy, published three years after Candide, to mean “a careless person,” and Irish poet Thomas Moore first employed the word as an adjective meaning “nonchalant” or “indifferent” when he described Dublin as a “poco-curante” place in his memoirs of 1815.
He smiled serenely at the inordinate trouble they gave themselves, at all their great cares for little ends, at all the great weaknesses of little men of large desires. And yet this pococurante gentleman had many difficulties to encounter … and many little harmless vanities and weaknesses of his own, to make him singular and eccentric, of which, however, he was entirely unconscious.
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