The Words of the Week - Sept. 5
Dictionary lookups from Los Angeles, Lisbon, and Washington, D.C.
‘Posse comitatus’
Lookups for posse comitatus increased on Tuesday after a federal judge ruled that President Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act in Los Angeles.
A federal judge in California said President Trump broke the law by deploying roughly 5,000 Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June in response to immigration protests. The judge said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Defense Department had violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits using the military to enforce domestic law.
—The New York Times, 2 Sept. 2025
Posse comitatus is defined in our Unabridged dictionary as “the power of a county,” referring to the entire body of inhabitants who may be summoned by the sheriff to assist in the preserving of the public peace, or to a body of persons so summoned. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, referenced by the federal judge, was passed at the end of Reconstruction (1865–77) in order to prevent the use of the U.S. military for the enforcement of domestic law in the occupied South.
‘Monopoly’
Another court ruling created another top lookup, monopoly.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a shake-up of Google’s search engine in an attempt to curb the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly while rebuffing the U.S. government’s attempt to break up the company and impose other restraints. … The handcuffs being slapped on Google will preclude contracts that give its search engine, Gemini AI app, Play Store for Android and virtual assistant an exclusive position on smartphone, personal computers and other devices.
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We define several senses of monopoly, which can refer to a commodity controlled by a single party, exclusive possession or control of something, or exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action. The relevant sense in the quote above is “one that has a monopoly.” Monopoly traces back through Latin to the Greek word monopōlion, itself a combination of mon- and the verb pōlein, meaning “to sell.”
‘Funicular’
A deadly crash in Portugal led to a rise in lookups for funicular.
At least 15 people were killed and 18 others were injured, five of them critically, on Wednesday, when a popular funicular in Lisbon derailed and crashed, according to Portugal’s health ministry.
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Funicular refers to a cable railway ascending a mountain, and is used especially for one in which an ascending car counterbalances a descending car. The noun funicular descends from an earlier adjective meaning “relating to a cord under tension.” It was also influenced by funiculaire, a French word used for a type of railway that is dependent upon cables (or on “cords under tension”). Ultimately, these terms trace back to the Latin noun funiculus, meaning “small rope.”
‘Hoax’
Hoax was a top lookup this week following President Donald Trump’s use of the word to refer to the push to release files related to the Epstein files, and subsequent reaction by Epstein’s victims to this usage.
Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have gathered on Capitol Hill to demand the release of the sex trafficking investigation into the late financier. On Wednesday, they pushed back against President Donald Trump’s dismissal of the issue as a “hoax.”
—Lisa Phillips, an accuser of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, said it was “shocking and upsetting” for her to hear President Trump call their Capitol Hill push for transparency a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. “For me, personally, it was shocking and upsetting. I just—I couldn’t believe that he said that,” Phillips said on CNN’s “AC360” when asked for her reaction to Trump’s comments.
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We define two senses of the noun hoax: “an act intended to trick or dupe” and “something accepted or established by fraud or fabrication.” The word is probably a contraction of hocus, as in “hocus pocus.”
‘Charlatan’
Lookups for charlatan rose dramatically on Thursday before and during Senate testimony given by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Almost every Democratic member of the Senate Finance Committee called on Robert F. Kennedy Jr to step down as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services following a major shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). … “By discarding well-established science related to vaccines, elevating conspiracy theorists and self-interested charlatans to positions of public trust, and presiding over the largest cut to American health care in history, Robert Kennedy has reinforced every fear families had about him,” the senators wrote in their statement.
—Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell asked Kennedy, who’s said he flew on the now-disgraced financier’s plane, what he thought about victims of Epstein who appeared on the steps of the Capitol this week to call for greater transparency into Epstein’s operation and demise. “I don’t know about any women on the steps,” Kennedy told Cantwell, who tied critiques of the health secretary’s decision-making to his ties to Epstein, and called Kennedy a “charlatan.”
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We define two senses of charlatan. The first is synonymous with quack and refers to an ignorant, misinformed, or dishonest practitioner of medicine, while the second is synonymous with fraud and faker and refers to someone who makes usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability. The quack sense is the earlier of the two, coming, in roundabout fashion, from the name of an Italian village, Cerreto, which was said to be rife with medical practitioners of questionable worth.
Word Worth Knowing: ‘Philamot’
Philamot refers to a brownish orange color that is reminiscent of autumn foliage. It is rarely used these days, but has a host of synonyms that have been used over the centuries, including autumn leaf, dead leaf, foliage brown, leather lake, oakleaf brown, withered leaf and feuille morte. In fact, philamot comes ultimately from the French feuille morte, which translates to “dead leaf.”
The isle affords no wood of any kind, but a few bushes of juniper on the little hills. The stones, upon which the scurf corkir grows—which dyes a crimson colour—are found here; as also those that produce the crottil, which dyes a philamot colour.
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