Today's Word "Gulag"
Published in Vocabulary
gulag \GOO-lahg\ (noun) - 1 : The system of forced-labor camp in the former Soviet Union. 2 : Any prison or forced-labor camp, especially one for political prisoners. 3 : A place of great hardship.
"The new management's cost-cutting efforts rapidly turned what had been a pleasant work environment into a gulag-like place of toil."
From Russian Gulag, acronym from Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh LAGere (Chief Administration for Corrective Labour Camps). Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps.
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