the.com/holocaust
The Nazi genocide of six million Jews, a horror the word now almost exclusively names.
means Total destruction by fire — a word now bound almost entirely to the Nazi genocide of six million Jews, so that its older, broader sense has nearly vanished from use.
from From Greek 'holokauston' — 'holos' (whole) plus 'kaustos' (burnt) — meaning a sacrifice entirely consumed by flame on the altar, nothing left over for the priests or the offerer. The word passed through Latin into English centuries ago meaning any wholesale burning or destruction, used that way for a long stretch of its life. In the mid-20th century it narrowed and darkened, becoming the proper noun for the Nazi genocide — so that a term once meaning 'burnt whole' came to mean 'erased whole.'
- origin
- Greek for burnt whole, once meant any sacrifice
- scale
- six million Jews, plus millions of others murdered
- machinery
- an industrialized state bureaucracy built to kill efficiently
- purpose now
- the baseline for measuring never again, constantly tested