Words from wartime
Vocabulary that came out of the trenches, the barracks and the battlefield and stayed in everyday speech long after the fighting ended.
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- Agent Orange
Between 1961 and 1971, the US military sprayed millions of gallons of herbicide over Vietnam to strip the jungle canopy that hid enemy movement, labeling each formula by the color of the stripe painted around its 55-gallon storage drums: Purple, Pink, Green…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Ambulance
Napoleon's chief military surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey, noticed that wounded soldiers left on the battlefield for hours or days were dying of injuries that prompt treatment could have handled. His fix was a light, fast, horse-drawn cart, stocked with…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Armada
"Armada" is simply the Spanish for "armed," the feminine past participle of "armar," and in Spanish it still means any navy. English borrowed it in the 1530s as a general word for a fleet, and then 1588 happened. The 130 ships Philip II sent against England…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Armageddon
The Book of Revelation names the site of the final battle between good and evil as a place called Har Megiddo, Hebrew for the hill of Megiddo, an ancient city in northern Israel that had already witnessed dozens of real battles by the time Revelation was…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Armistice
Armistice was built on the model of "solstice": Latin arma ("weapons") plus -stitium, from sistere, "to bring to a standstill." A solstice is the sun standing still at its extreme point; an armistice is weapons standing still — a literal cessation of arms…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Assassin
Assassin comes from hashishiyy, an Arabic nickname applied to the Nizari Ismailis, a sect active during the Crusades under the "Old Man of the Mountain," Hasan-i Sabbah. European Crusaders believed the name referred to hashish use before politically motivated…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Atomic bomb
H.G. Wells's 1914 novel The World Set Free imagined a war fought with "atomic bombs" that kept exploding for days, and it is the earliest known use of the phrase. Physicist Leo Szilard read the book in 1932, and after conceiving the nuclear chain reaction in…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Avant-garde
French military writers had used the phrase for the troops marching ahead of the main army since medieval times, but its leap into art and politics is usually dated to 1825, when the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon and his follower Olinde Rodrigues…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Camouflage
In 1915 the French army needed a way to hide artillery, trucks, and observation posts from aerial reconnaissance, so it formed a dedicated Section de Camouflage led by painter Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scevola and staffed almost entirely with working artists…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Cardigan
The cardigan sweater is named for James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, the British cavalry officer who led the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava in 1854 — an assault into direct Russian artillery fire caused by a badly garbled…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Cravat
In 1660, a regiment of Croatian mercenaries serving the French crown arrived wearing distinctive knotted scarves, and French courtiers were charmed enough to start imitating them. The garment got nicknamed after the soldiers' nationality, "Croat," which…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Deadline
Long before it meant "the report is due Friday," a "deadline" was an actual line, marked with fencing or planks around the perimeter of Civil War prison camps like Andersonville. Any prisoner who crossed it, even by accident, could be shot on sight without…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Enigma
An "enigma" — a baffling riddle — comes from a Greek word meaning exactly that, ainigma. The word took on a second, far more famous life in the 20th century when it lent its name to a German cipher machine used to scramble military communications, whose…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Ersatz
Borrowed from German, "ersatz" originally just meant "replacement," a neutral engineering term. It took on its current slightly sneering tone in English largely during World War II, when Germany's wartime shortages produced ersatz coffee, ersatz rubber, and…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Espionage
"Espionage" comes from French espionnage, from espionner, "to spy," from espion, "a spy" — and that French chain eventually traces back to the same ancient Germanic root that gave English the word "spy" directly. Two words for the same shady profession…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - Foot Locker
Long before it was a shoe store, a "foot locker" was a small, lockable wooden trunk kept at the base of a soldier's bunk, standard issue in military barracks by World War Two for storing uniforms and personal effects. The retail chain borrowed the name more…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Freelance
The earliest known "free lance" is in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, published in 1819, where a baron boasts of the paid company of "Free Lances" he can put in the field: mercenary knights whose weapons were pledged to no lord. Scott may have revived rather than…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Grenade
Spanish "granada" is a pomegranate, from Latin "granatum," full of seeds. The early explosive of the 1500s was a hollow iron ball about the size of the fruit, packed with powder and fragments, and the resemblance was obvious enough that the "grenade" took the…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Guerrilla
"Guerrilla" is a Spanish diminutive of guerra, "war," literally meaning "little war." It entered English during the Peninsular War of 1808 to 1814, describing the irregular resistance that Spanish civilians waged against Napoleon's occupying army, tying down…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Honcho
American soldiers stationed in occupied Japan after 1945, and again in Korea a few years later, picked up the Japanese "hanchō," meaning the leader of a squad or work group, and brought it home as slang for whoever was in charge. "Honcho" was in print in…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Infantry
In medieval Italy, an "infante" was a youth, and by extension one of the young men who marched on foot beside a mounted knight, the low end of a feudal army. Italian "infanteria," via French, reached English in the 1570s as "infantry." The word shares its…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Kamikaze
Long before it described WWII fighter pilots, "kamikaze" meant "divine wind," and referred specifically to the typhoons that scattered two Mongol invasion fleets bound for Japan in the 13th century. For centuries the word carried a note of national salvation…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Khaki
"Khaki" simply means "dust-colored," from a South Asian word for dust that entered English through the British Indian Army in the 1840s. British officers, tired of their bright white uniforms making them highly visible targets, began dyeing their cottons with…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Lieutenant
"Lieutenant" is Old French for "place-holding": someone who holds a superior's place when the superior is absent. That's why a lieutenant governor stands in for a governor, and why the military rank sits just below a captain. Nobody has ever fully explained…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Loot
Hindi "lūṭ," from a Sanskrit root meaning to rob or break, was one of dozens of words East India Company soldiers carried home. "Loot" is recorded in English from 1788, first as a noun for plunder taken in war, then as a verb, and by the 20th century it had…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Magenta
The color magenta started out with a completely different name. French chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin patented the vivid pink-red aniline dye in 1859 and called it "fuchsine," after the fuchsia flower. Later that same year, French and Sardinian forces…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Marathon
The town of Marathon, site of the 490 BC battle where the Athenians beat the Persians, probably takes its name from the Greek word for fennel, which grew wild on the plain. The race named for it is a much newer invention, and its famously awkward distance is…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Napalm
Developed in secret at a Harvard University lab in 1942 by chemist Louis Fieser, "napalm" gets its name from a blend of two chemical terms, naphthenic acid and palmitic acid, for the compounds originally used to thicken gasoline into the sticky, flammable gel.
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Ninja
A "ninja" was originally a covert agent trained in espionage, sabotage, and assassination during Japan's feudal era. In just the last few decades, English has stretched the word into casual slang for anyone unusually skilled at a task, coding very much…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - No man's land
Long before it meant the deadly strip of ground between opposing trenches, the phrase described disputed or ownerless territory in medieval England, recorded as early as 1320 in the spelling "nonesmanneslond," and used specifically for a patch of ground just…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Ovation
A Roman "ovatio" was a lesser triumph: a general who had won a victory without a proper pitched battle, or against an unworthy enemy, was allowed to enter the city on foot or on horseback rather than in a chariot. Plutarch explained the name by the sheep…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Over the top
In the trenches of the First World War, "over the top" was the order to climb the parapet and advance across no man's land into machine-gun fire. An American volunteer, Arthur Guy Empey, used it as the title of his 1917 memoir and defined it as "the order for…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Radar
"Radar" is an acronym, coined by the US Navy in the early 1940s: RAdio Detection And Ranging. Britain had been developing similar technology under the far less catchy name RDF (Radio Direction Finding), but once the American term caught on during World War…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Raglan
A "raglan sleeve" — cut in one diagonal piece running from the underarm up to the collar, instead of stitched in at the shoulder — is named for FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, a British army commander who lost his right arm at the Battle of Waterloo in…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Red Cross
Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, horrified by the suffering he witnessed among wounded soldiers after the 1859 Battle of Solferino, campaigned for a neutral organization to care for casualties on any side of a conflict, and the relief committee he helped found…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Rendezvous
"Rendezvous" is a French imperative, literally "present yourselves." It entered English in the 1590s as a term for a designated troop-assembly point, decades before it softened into the far less martial sense of a planned meeting, romantic or otherwise.
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Reveille
"Reveille," the bugle call that wakes a military camp, comes from the French command réveillez, "wake up," itself built from a Latin root meaning to keep watch. The tune has called American troops to muster since at least 1812.
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Revolver
Samuel Colt was still in his early twenties when he patented a repeating pistol in 1836 that could fire multiple shots from a single revolving cylinder without reloading — a radical improvement on the single-shot pistols of the day. His first manufacturing…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Rostrum
After Rome's fleet won its first major naval victory, over the town of Antium in 338 BC, the victors stripped the beak-shaped bronze rams from the bows of the defeated ships and hauled them back to the Forum, where they were mounted as trophies along the…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Salvo
A salvo — whether it's cannon fire or a burst of applause — traces back to Latin salve, "hail," the standard Roman greeting. Italian salva extended that into a ceremonial gun-volley fired to greet an important visitor, and English borrowed the word in the…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Shrapnel
In 1784, Henry Shrapnel, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, designed a hollow cannonball filled with musket balls and a small bursting charge, timed by a fuse to explode in the air above enemy troops. The British Army adopted it in 1803 as "spherical case…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Sideburns
Ambrose Burnside, a Civil War Union general, wore a facial hair style so distinctive that people started calling the style "burnsides" after him. Somewhere along the way the two halves of the word swapped places, and "sideburns" stuck instead, an…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Skunk Works
In 1943, Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson was told to design and build America's first jet fighter, the XP-80, in total secrecy and in record time. There was no spare building for his team, so they set up shop in a rented circus tent pitched next to a plastics…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Spanish flu
Spain was neutral in the First World War, so when the 1918 influenza arrived there in May, its newspapers reported it in full, including the news that King Alfonso XIII had come down with it. France, Britain, Germany, and the United States were all censoring…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Spartan
To call something "spartan" — stripped-down, austere, self-disciplined to a fault — is to invoke the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, whose citizens were raised from childhood under one of history's most demanding military training regimens, the agoge…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Tank
When Britain began building armored fighting vehicles in 1915, the Landship Committee needed a cover name, since "landship" said too much. Workers at the Foster's factory in Lincoln were told the riveted steel hulls were mobile water containers for the…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Trench coat
Burberry and Aquascutum have argued for a century over who invented the "trench coat," and both have a case: Aquascutum was waterproofing wool in the 1850s, and Thomas Burberry patented gabardine in 1879 and a belted officer's coat in 1912. What's certain is…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Tube Alloys
When Britain authorized its atomic bomb program in August 1941, the civil servant in charge, Sir John Anderson, and the ICI chemist running it, Wallace Akers, needed a name that would attract no attention whatsoever. They chose "Tube Alloys," which was, as…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Uzi
Israel's military adopted this compact submachine gun in 1951 and named it for the young army officer who designed it — even though, according to accounts from those who knew him, Uziel Gal actually asked for the weapon not to carry his name. His request was…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Waterloo
Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 gave English an idiom almost immediately, but the specific, personal phrasing "meet one's Waterloo" took longer to arrive. Arthur Conan Doyle appears to be the first to use it in exactly that sense, in a 1905 Sherlock…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup →