GULAG

gulag

(noun) a Russian prison camp for political prisoners

Source: WordNet® 3.1


Etymology

Noun

gulag (plural gulags)

A prison camp.

The system of all Soviet prison and/or labor camps in use during the Stalinist period.

One important difference between the GULAG system and the Nazi concentration camps was that a person sentenced to five years of hard labor in a Soviet labor camp could expect, assuming he or she survived, to be released at the end of the sentence. [Gulag: Soviet Prison Camps and Their Legacy; By David Hosford, Pamela Kachurin and Thomas Lamont. National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, Harvard University]

Verb

gulag (third-person singular simple present gulags, present participle gulaging, simple past and past participle gulaged)

(informal, transitive) To force into this prison or a similar system.

Source: Wiktionary



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Word of the Day

3 April 2025

WHOLE

(noun) an assemblage of parts that is regarded as a single entity; “how big is that part compared to the whole?”; “the team is a unit”


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Coffee Trivia

The Boston Tea Party helped popularize coffee in America. The hefty tea tax imposed on the colonies in 1773 resulted in America switching from tea to coffee. In the lead up to the Revolutionary War, it became patriotic to sip java instead of tea. The Civil War made the drink more pervasive. Coffee helped energize tired troops, and drinking it became an expression of freedom.

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