The English language, like all languages around the world, is an evolving entity. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster and other reference works
recognize this, and they periodically add to their dictionaries new English words that reflect changes in recent usage. Many of these additions emerge from current social media and digital communication, like doomscroll, finsta, or shadow ban. Others fall into the
categories of economics (greedflation), the environment (re-wild), or popular culture (Barbiecore).
But new English words can also come to us from military sources, and today I introduce one that I hope will eventually find its way into our dictionaries. The word is “doubliterate.” It is a transitive verb meaning to obliterate something that has already been obliterated once before, in other words, to re-obliterate or to obliterate again. I introduce this word as it relates to the annihilation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program
by U.S. military forces, an act of obliteration that first occurred eight months ago, when the United States used bunker buster bombs to destroy the nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. That first obliteration of Iranian nuclear capabilities, in June of 2025, named Operation Midnight Hammer, was supplemented in February of 2026 by Operation Epic Fury, in which Iran’s nuclear program was obliterated again, or to use my newly coined term, doubliterated. (We can hold in reserve the word “tribliterate,” just in case we
need it someday).
The word has just been invented, so no one in the federal government has used it yet, but it is now there for the taking. I suspect that it might appeal to some public officials who seem to rely so often on convoluted, contradictory, and misleading language, and I will keep my ears open and my hopes alive at the next press briefing. As we consider these trivial questions of vocabulary, I urge us to keep in our thoughts the things that are most important to remember about the war in Iran: the seven U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in
service to their country, the 140 service members who were wounded, and the 160
elementary schoolchildren who were killed in their classrooms in Minab. No words, old or
new, are adequate to describe what those families are feeling today.
Greg Tuleja
Southampton