Holocaust
/ˈhɒləkɔːst/noun
A destruction on an enormous scale, and with a capital H the Nazi murder of Europe's Jews.
The Greek roots
Literally: “wholly burnt”
The story of the word
A ὁλόκαυστον was a sacrifice burnt entire, with no portion kept back for the priests or the family meal, and the Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible used the word for the whole burnt offerings of Leviticus. English borrowed that ritual sense in the thirteenth century and later stretched it to any total destruction by fire. Fixed on the Nazi genocide from the 1940s onward, it became so heavy that the small-h sense is now almost unusable.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 13th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Survivors of the Holocaust recorded testimony well into their nineties.
Older translations of Leviticus still use holocaust where modern ones say burnt offering.