The Words of the Week - Jul 10
Dictionary lookups from the World Cup, Madison Square Garden, and Love Island
Vincent Alban/Getty Images
‘Red card’
The soccer term (or football term, if you prefer) red card has seen higher lookups than usual lately.
Folarin Balogun will be on the field Monday night when the United States faces Belgium in the World Cup Round of 16 in Seattle, after FIFA suspended the one-game ban that stemmed from his red card against Bosnia-Herzegovina and replaced it with a one-year probationary period.
—Odafe Oghen, The Grio, 5 July 2026
We define red card as “a red card that a referee holds in the air to indicate that a player who has broken the rules of the game will not be allowed to continue playing.”
‘Fissiparous’
Coverage of the World Cup also caused a spike in lookups for the adjective fissiparous.
Many Belgian players play abroad, in renowned clubs that grant them quite some individual initiative. As a result, the team has always suffered from fissiparous tendencies during tournaments.
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We define fissiparous as “tending to break or split up into parts.” When it first entered English in the mid-late 19th century, fissiparous concerned reproduction. In biology, a fissiparous organism is one that produces new individuals by fission—that is, by dividing into separate parts, each of which becomes a unique organism. (Most strains of bacteria do this.) Fissiparous has ancestors in the Latin fissus, the past participle of findere (“to split”), and parere, meaning “to give birth to” or “to produce.” By the end of the 19th century fissiparous had acquired a figurative meaning, describing something that breaks into parts or causes something else to break into parts.
‘Immerge’
Lookups for immerge surged after the word emerged in the subtitles of the reality television series Love Island USA.
biggest surprise was finding out sincere used “immerge” correctly.
—… going to go on believing that he was saying “emerge” but meaning “immerse” and that production threw him a bone by writing “immerge” in the subtitles.
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We define the verb immerge as “to plunge into or immerse oneself in something.” It is far less common than immerse, and sometimes confused with emerge, but it does appear correctly in print on occasion.
You can immerge your specimen inside this solution, and then the soft tissues will start to absorb it.
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‘Window seat’
More people than usual looked up window seat this week, as the word figures prominently in a lawsuit.
A federal judge ruled this week that United Airlines must face a lawsuit filed by passengers who alleged the window seats they paid extra for had no outside views. … On Monday, July 6, U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco ruled that United Airlines must defend itself against the lawsuit after the company argued it had never contractually promised window seats to passengers and that the term “window” referred to the position in the cabin, Reuters reported.
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We define two senses of window seat. The first, which dates to the mid-18th century, refers to a seat built into a window recess. The relevant sense here is “a seat next to a window (as in a bus or airplane).” The word window traces back to the Old Norse vindauga, from vindr (“wind”) + auga (“eye”).
‘Firework’
Firework rocketed up the Top Lookups chart over the semiquincentennial Fourth of July weekend.
Safety is key for people setting off fireworks
—I remember the first year we lived in Madera. Our house was one of the first houses built on our street, and so much of the block was still dirt. There was nothing but a field behind our house. We could easily see the fairgrounds from our house, so it was a perfect spot to watch the fireworks.
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We define several senses of firework. In the first quote above, it refers to a device for producing a striking display by the combustion of explosive or flammable compositions. This sense can be singular or plural, though is most often encountered in the plural. The word is always pluralized when referring to a display produced by such devices, as in the second quote.
‘Dirigo’
Dirigo has been trending this week, as the word features prominently in many photographs on a shirt worn by Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who suspended his campaign this week.
Dirigo is a Latin verb translated as “I direct.” It is the motto of Maine referring by analogy to the North Star appearing on the state seal.
Maine’s Dirigo motto means “I lead,” and we must continue to do so. Mainers have always played pivotal roles in American history—from the first naval battle of the American Revolution in Machias to Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg, Ed Muskie’s leadership in the environmental revolution and countless unsung heroes.
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Word Worth Knowing: ‘Gammelost’
Even though Norway won its World Cup game against Brazil over the weekend, it got us thinking about gammelost (sorry, cheesy joke). The word gammelost is defined in our Unabridged dictionary as “a Norwegian blue-mold cheese made from soured skim milk,” and comes from the Norwegian words gammel (“old”) + ost (“cheese”). If the Norwegian team keeps on winning, maybe gammelost could become the next “new” cheese.
Producers of Norway’s version of “American Idol” and other shows say they’re looking for “fun, outgoing Americans with Norwegian ancestry”—honestly, those are their words—to go to Norway and “compete in extreme cultural challenges” for a prize of $50,000. In addition to having some Norwegian roots—“even a little bit counts”—participants must be 18 to 60 years old and can’t have traveled to Norway before. They probably want to capture first reactions to mountains, gammelost (literally, old cheese) or the bill for dinner with drinks.
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