Holocaust

Always capitalize when referring to the murder of 6 million Jews and others during World War II. Lowercase in other uses.

The word holocaust is derived from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), and was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. The lowercase term holocaust was used to describe the violent deaths of large groups of people beginning in the 18th century, according the Oxford English Dictionary, and was used by Winston Churchill and others to refer to the genocide of Armenians during World War I.

The English translation of the Proclamation of Independence establishing the state of Israel in 1948 mentions the survivors of “the Nazi holocaust in Europe.” In the years after that, the word gained wide usage to describe the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. It’s been speculated that use of the word holocaust to describe that event may stem in part from the role of fire as a tool of mass destruction in the extermination camps, where the bodies of victims were burned in crematoria and open blazes.

In Israel and France, Shoʾah, a biblical Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe,” became the preferred term for the genocide, after the release of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary of that name. The term Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews—not the totality of Nazi victims, which also included Germans deemed intellectually, physically, or emotionally unfit; as well as the Roma people (pejoratively known as Gypsies), gay people, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Because of its associations with genocide, some people may object to use of the word holocaust in other contexts, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

For more about the Holocaust, see the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Updated April 2021