"The Holocaust" is the name commonly applied since the mid 1970s to the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. The term is also used more broadly to include all the victims of Nazi genocide and persecution between 1933 and 1945: political dissidents, Soviet POWs, the disabled, the Roma, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

A number of other terms are also used to describe the genocide.

"Holocaust"

The word "holocaust" originally derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering", or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god". In Greek and Roman pagan rites, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word "holocaust" was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the "olah", sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required to make.

Since the mid-19th century, the word has been used by many authors to refer to large catastrophes and massacres, particularly those caused by immolation. According to the OED, the earliest attested such usage dates from 1671, but it became common in the 19th century. In 1833 the journalist Leitch Ritchie, writing about the medieval French monarch Louis VII, wrote that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church". This refers to his invasion of Vitry-le-François in 1142 during which the 1,300 inhabitants of the town were burnt alive in the church.

In the early twentieth century the term was widely used to refer to massacres of Armenians in Turkey, particularly during World War I. The Armenian Genocide is referenced in the title of a 1922 poem "The Holocaust" (published as a booklet) and the 1923 book "The Smyrna Holocaust" deals with arson and massacre of Armenians in Smyrna. In 1929, Winston Churchill referred to "helpless Armenians, men, women, and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust" (The World Crisis).

Before the Second World War, the possibility of another war was referred to as "another holocaust" (that is, a repeat of the First World War). With reference to the events of the war, writers in English from 1945 used the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima, or the effects of a nuclear war, although from the 1950s onwards, it was increasingly used in English to refer to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews.

By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew sometimes used the word "Holocaust" to translate "Shoah", as the Judeocide. This use can be found as early as May 23, 1943, in The New York Times, on page E6, in an article by Julian Meltzer, referring to feelings in Palestine about Jewish immigration of refugees from "the Nazi holocaust." By the late 1960s, the term was starting to be used in this sense without qualification. Nora Levin's 1968 book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 explains the meaning in its subtitle, but uses the unmoderated phrase "The Holocaust". An article called “Moral Trauma and the Holocaust” was published in the New York Times on February 12, 1968. However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period. The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust" and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.

The term became increasingly widespread as a synonym for "genocide" in the last decades of the 20th century to refer to mass murders in the form "X holocaust" (e.g. "Rwandan holocaust"). Examples are Rwanda, the Ukraine under Stalin, and the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

In order to suggest comparison with Nazi murders other historical events have also been labeled "Holocausts", for example the oppression of lower caste groups in India ("Sudra Holocaust") or the slave trade ("African Holocaust"). Such usages are often heavily disputed. Even more contested is the use of the word in the older sense of "immolation" to refer to Allied WW2 bombings, since this is sometimes adopted to imply equivalence between the Allied and the Nazi war record.

"Final Solution"

The "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem" was the Nazis' own term, coined by Adolf Eichmann as a euphemism. Before the word "Holocaust" became normative this phrase was also used by writers in English. For example in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the genocide is described as "The Final Solution" (in quotation marks; the word "Holocaust" is not mentioned). Whereas the term "Holocaust" is now often used to include all casualties of the Nazi death camps and murder squads, the "Final Solution" refers exclusively to the genocide of Jews.

"Shoah"

The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. In recent literature it is specifically prefixed with Ha ("The" in Hebrew) when referring to Nazi mass-murders, for the same reason that holocaust becomes The Holocaust. It may be spelled Ha-Shoah or HaShoah, as in Yom HaShoah.

Churban Europa, meaning "European Destruction" in Hebrew (as opposed to simply Churban, the destruction of the Second Temple), is also used.

The Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some Jews and non-Jews due to the supposed theologically unacceptable nature of the word "holocaust" whose original Greek meaning indicates a sacrifice to a god.

"Porajmos"

The Porajmos (also Porrajmos) literally "Devouring", or Samudaripen ("Mass killing") is a term coined by the Roma people to describe attempts by the Nazis to exterminate most of the Roma peoples of Europe. The phenomenon has been little studied.

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