gulag
/ˈɡuˌlɑɡ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.85 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
2
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Also GULAG: the system of all Soviet labour camps and prisons in use, especially during the Stalinist period (1930s–1950s).
noun
A prison camp, especially one used to hold political prisoners.
noun
A place where, or political system in which, people with dissident views are routinely oppressed.
verb
To compel (someone) into a forced labour camp or a similar place of confinement or exile.
Informal; Transitive verb
noun
Alternative letter-case form of gulag.
name
The government agency in charge of the Soviet Union's network of forced labour camps, which was established in 1918 and formally abolished in 1960.
noun
Alternative letter-case form of gulag.
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "Nevertheless, the Trump administration has continued to insist that Abrego Garcia is a dangerous gang member in order to justify sending him to an overseas Gulag that has been accused of torturing inmates."
- "The subtext of Knowles’s tweet was also clear: [Nayib] Bukele has partnered with the Trump administration to hold immigrants deported from America, with no due process, in El Salvador’s most notorious gulag."
- "Regulative censorships can be amended or revolutionized in ways that raise or lower bodycounts, numbers of books banned or citizens ghettoed or gulaged."
- "The marriage would be the last good thing in [Spencer] Haywood's life for a long time. He was gulaged to basketball Siberia—the now-defunct New Orleans franchise—for his failure to resurrect the Knicks, but at [Kareem Abdul-]Jabbar's urging the Lakers acquired him in 1980."
- "Such a situation touches off in the reader a powerful sense of historical déjà vu: witch hunts, Gestapo roundups, the McCarthy era, Argentinian death squads, [Francisco] Franco and the murder of [Federico] Garcia Lorca, the KGB and the disappearance of Isaac Babel, the gulagging of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, to name just a few."
Etymology
Borrowed from Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG), the acronym of Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”), the government agency in charge of the Soviet Union’s network of forced labour camps, which was established in 1918 and formally abolished in 1960: see GULAG.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈɡuˌlɑɡ/
- British English: /ˈɡuːlɑɡ/