Some 16th-century Italian clergymen tried to ban coffee because they believed it to be “satanic.” However, Pope Clement VII loved coffee so much that he lifted the ban and had coffee baptized in 1600.
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
Recent Word Finds
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”
Coffee Trivia
