The Words of the Week - Jan. 16
Dictionary lookups from music, Minnesota, and the Pacific
‘Grateful’
The death of Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir led to more lookups than usual for the word grateful.
Grateful Dead founding member Bob Weir has died. Weir played rhythm guitar and sang lead vocals for the entirety of the Grateful Dead’s 30-year tenure. He also founded and played in several bands during and after his time with the Dead, including Kingfish, the Bob Weir Band, Bobby and the Midnites, Scaring the Children, RatDog, and Furthur.
—Michelle Hyun Kim, Pitchfork, 10 Jan. 2026
We define several senses of grateful (which comes from the obsolete word grate, meaning “pleasing, thankful”), including “feeling or showing thanks,” “expressing gratitude” (as in “a grateful smile”), and “affording pleasure or contentment.”
‘Hot pants’
Lookups for many shorts-related words were also high, in connection with the sartorial style of the late Bob Weir, including cutoffs, jorts, and hot pants.
Bob Weir, a Virtuoso of Hot Pants
—Unlike his bandmates in the Dead, Weir had a long-running interest in personal style, and frequently opted for tucked-in button-down shirts, western wear and polo shirts instead of tie-dye and ponchos. “I just wanted to be kind of elegant,” he told GQ in 2019. “People were paying good money to see us, and at that time I figured that meant we ought to dress up a bit.” His denim cutoffs, which crept up in length over the years, were known as Bobby Shorts.
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We define cutoffs as “shorts originally made from jeans with the legs cut off at the knees or higher,” jorts as “shorts made of denim or jean,” and hot pants as “very short shorts.”
‘Perfidy’
Lookups for perfidy spiked on Monday.
The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first attack on a boat that the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs, killing 11 people last September, according to officials briefed on the matter. … But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.”
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We define two senses of the noun perfidy: as a synonym of treachery meaning “the quality or state of being faithless or disloyal,” and as “an act or an instance of disloyalty.” The adjective form of perfidy is perfidious, which not only implies treacherousness, but also an inability to be reliable or honorable.
‘White supremacy’
Lookups for white supremacy were high this week.
Union leaders have accused the Trump administration of a “rhetorical shift towards white supremacy” after social media posts by the US Department of Labor drew comparison with a Nazi slogan.
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We define two senses of white supremacy, “the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races” and “the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races.”
‘Flash-bang’
Lookups for flash-bang have been higher than usual this week, following news out of Minnesota.
A man said his children were taken to the hospital after his vehicle was hit by a flashbang grenade during clashes between protesters and police in north Minneapolis.
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A flash-bang grenade (also called a flash-bang, flash grenade, or stun grenade) is an explosive device that produces a blinding flash of light and a sudden, loud noise intended to temporarily stun, distract, and disperse people and that is thrown by hand or projected. Flash-bang has been used with this meaning since the mid-20th century. Grenade comes from the Middle French word grenade meaning, literally, “pomegranate.”
‘Splashdown’
News of the return of astronauts from the International Space Station led to a bump in lookups for splashdown.
An ailing astronaut returned to Earth with three others on Thursday, ending their space station mission more than a month early in NASA’s first medical evacuation. SpaceX guided the capsule to a middle-of-the-night splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego, less than 11 hours after the astronauts exited the International Space Station.
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Splashdown refers to the landing of a crewed spacecraft in the ocean. The splash in splashdown is an alteration of the older word plash, which is probably imitative of the sound of splashing.
Word Worth Knowing: ‘Pogonip’
Pogonip refers to a dense winter fog containing frozen particles that is formed in deep mountain valleys of the western United States. In the mountains of the western United States, the fog condenses into tiny, biting ice particles in extremely cold weather. English-speaking settlers who encountered this phenomenon in the 1800s needed a word for it, and ended up altering the Shoshone word paγɨnappɨh, meaning “cloud,” for this purpose.
Visibility on Highway 395 is being reduced by freezing fog on the west side of Carson Valley. The fog is leaving a coating of ice on things, including roads. … The ice will likely generate some pogonip on the west side, which consists of tiny ice crystals building on fences and trees. We've seen instances where it turns trees white.
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