Donald Trump Is Increasing Our Vocabulary

Donald Trump's status as the GOP frontrunner has apparently been a boon for Merriam-Webster. Politico takes a quirky look at what the online dictionary says have been spikes in word lookups tied to the 2016 candidates, with a Merriam-Webster associate editor telling the site that "Trump has brought up the motherlode of lookups." The Politico piece isn't long on examples, but here's one: The mogul's comments on immigrants led Sen. Lindsey Graham to say, "We have to reject this demagoguery"; Rick Perry called Trump's words "a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense."

But the word-search jump apparently didn't occur until July 17, the day after Trump tweeted: ".@GovernorPerry just gave a pollster quote on me. He doesn't understand what the word demagoguery means." (If you don't, here it is.) Other politically inspired searches include the phrase "Hobson's choice"—used in a Fox News op-ed in reference to Hillary Clinton having to turn over her email server. Some of her recently revealed emails also led to a spike in searches for the word "louche," a word adviser Sid Blumenthal used to describe John Boehner.