# When did we start using "holocaust"
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [March 10, 2019, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859 "2019-03-10T00:11:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2019, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/21 "2019-03-11T13:15:08Z")
The word for today is…
[Bazaar:](https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+bazaar&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS762US762&oq=define%3A+bazaar&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.9167j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) a market in a Middle Eastern country.
[Bizarre:](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS762US762&ei=al6GXKDtLceEtQW_yr-gDQ&q=define%3A+bizarre&oq=define%3A+bizarre&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0.35525.46466..46692...5.0..0.90.590.7......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71j0i67j0i10j0i22i10i30j35i39.Mm8EWZnKnVw) very strange or unusual, especially so as to cause interest or amusement.
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### Author:  [@madmonk28](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madmonk28)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2019, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/22 "2019-03-11T13:53:08Z")
I hadn’t realized that the Holocaust wasn’t in common usage until the '70s. I had assumed it was given that name during the end of WWII. I remember a MASH episode in which Radar was reading a war comic and he asked Hawkeye what a holocaust was and Hawkeye said it was a big fire; I was a kid and that was the first time I realized that holocaust had a meaning besides the Nazi extermination program.
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### Author:  [@sps49sd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sps49sd)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2019, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/23 "2019-03-11T14:22:13Z")
There was a miniseries in the late 70s titled The Holocaust; I have the impression that most non-Jewish people had no idea until the miniseries aired.
I don’t recall hearing the term before the miniseries, althouhg I was aware of what had happened.
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### Author:  [@Hermitian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hermitian)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2019, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/24 "2019-03-11T14:27:14Z")
> [@Musicat](#):
>
> The word for today is…
>
> [Bazaar:](https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+bazaar&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS762US762&oq=define%3A+bazaar&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.9167j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) a market in a Middle Eastern country.
>
> [Bizarre:](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS762US762&ei=al6GXKDtLceEtQW_yr-gDQ&q=define%3A+bizarre&oq=define%3A+bizarre&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0.35525.46466..46692...5.0..0.90.590.7......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71j0i67j0i10j0i22i10i30j35i39.Mm8EWZnKnVw) very strange or unusual, especially so as to cause interest or amusement.
Yea, y’all laugh now. But when I get to be Emperor Of The World. I’m going to fix\* English. I am going to fix it _real good_.
And I say that as a native English speaker.
\*If something so totally and completely screwed up as English can even been fixed. Might need to nuke it from orbit.
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### Author:  [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2019, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/25 "2019-03-11T18:03:57Z")
> [@Hermitian](#):
>
> So there was this big huge event in history, and it took people decades to come up with a common name for it? 😕
Wait until you hear about World War I.
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### Author:  [@Treppenwitz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Treppenwitz)
#### Post date: [March 11, 2019, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/26 "2019-03-11T22:25:12Z")
> [@DrCube](#):
>
> Wait until you hear about World War I.
Naming that didn’t take long at all.
> **[World War I | Names](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I#Names)**
>
> The first recorded use of the term First World War was in September 1914 by German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel who stated, "There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word." It was later used as a title for his 1920 memoirs by Lt-Col. Charles à Court Repington.
> Before World War II, the events of 1914–1918 were generally known as the Great War or simply the World War. In August 1914, the mag...
j
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### Author:  [@Smudge777](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smudge777)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2019, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/27 "2019-03-12T02:02:37Z")
[https://www.etymonline.com/word/holocaust](https://www.etymonline.com/word/holocaust) suggests that the first recorded use of the term holocaust (note the lowercase h) in relation to WWII was in 1942 – as in, it was a holocaust, but not yet The Holocaust (note the uppercase H). The Holocaust is attributed to 1957.
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### Author:  [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2019, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/28 "2019-03-12T02:58:51Z")
> [@Treppenwitz](#):
>
> Naming that didn’t take long at all.
>
> [World War I - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I#Names)
>
> j
No. Haeckel wasn’t naming it “The First World War”; he was just pointing out that it was the first worldwide war.
After the event, the dominant name (in English) was the Great War or the World War, until there was another even greater world war, and distinctive names for each war became necessary.
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### Author:  [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2019, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/29 "2019-03-12T03:15:36Z")
I’m Jewish, and from the east coast of the US. I grew up knowing of it as “the holocaust”. I was born in 1961. The term must have been common in my circles by 1970.
I thought the etymology was Greek for “wholly burnt”, which was what the Greeks called some of the Hebrew sacrifices, which were allowed to burn up. The Greeks thought it bizarre of the Hebrews to waste food like that – they only sacrificed the parts they didn’t plan to eat when they made burnt offerings. Or so I had heard. (The Hebrews had a lot of other sacrifices that were not burnt up, and were eaten by the priests and their families.)
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### Author:  [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2019, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/30 "2019-03-12T05:37:39Z")
The Greeks didn’t think it was bizarre; they just recognised a distinction between the holocaust, in which the entire offering was given to the gods, usually to appease or propitiate them, and the commensal sacrifice, the point of which was a symbolic communal meal with the gods, to honour them or to assert or reinforce the relationship between a god and his or her particular people. They practiced both types of sacrifice themselves; which one was appropriate depended on the god to whom sacrifice was being offered, the purpose of the sacrifice, and no doubt other factors.
The Hebrews also recognised the distinction and practiced both kinds, but they regarded the holocaust as the superior form of sacrifice.
From the orginal meaning of wholly destroying something by fire as a means of sacrificing it to the gods, “holocaust” developed an expanded meaning of simply wholly destroying something, either literally by fire or figuratively so. And it’s from this latter mean that “the Holocaust” as a reference to the Nazi attempt to wholly destroy European Jewry is derived.
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### Author:  [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)
#### Post date: [March 12, 2019, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/31 "2019-03-12T21:52:23Z")
What I’ve read agrees with **UDS**. A holocaust was a sacrifice that was burned in its entirety. At least, that’s the origin of the word. Shoah just means ‘disaster, catastrophe’. In general Jewish thinking, the deaths and cremations in the camps were not a sacrfice to G-d. They were a disaster.
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### Author:  [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2019, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/32 "2019-03-13T14:27:20Z")
Some years ago, I saw"The History of Britain" on the History Channel. It indicated that “holocaust” (or the Middle English equivalent) was referred to a purge of Jews in Britain as early as the 12th or 13th century. The modern probably arose independently, though. I don’t know what their source was, so I can’t attest for its veracity .
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### Author:  [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2019, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-we-start-using-holocaust/830859/33 "2019-03-13T16:55:45Z")
> [@DocCathode](#):
>
> What I’ve read agrees with **UDS**. A holocaust was a sacrifice that was burned in its entirety. At least, that’s the origin of the word. Shoah just means ‘disaster, catastrophe’. In general Jewish thinking, the deaths and cremations in the camps were not a sacrfice to G-d. They were a disaster.
Not much to add to this, just that “shoah” also means devastation, ruin. Nothing to do with sacrifice (olah, korban, etc.)
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