During September, refugee set a new record for number of look-ups in a month (the previous record-holder was tsunami), and at one point in the controversy, refugee was being looked up approximately 1,000 times an hour.

Defenders of this use of the word pointed to the dictionary definition (such as the one below from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary) as evidence that the use was legitimate:

refugee noun : one that flees; especially : a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution

Surely, they said, the first and more general definition applies here.

Many critics of the use, however, insisted that refugee is only applied to non-U.S. citizens, thinking perhaps of the frequent use of the word in combination with Palestinian, Afghan, Cuban, or Vietnamese; hence, in their view, its use in this case was inappropriate and insensitive.

As usual in such controversies, both sides were partially right. Defenders were right that almost every dictionary published allows for a very general sense of refugee that would certainly apply to those who fled from Katrina.

On the other hand, critics were right to point to the more limited application of the word. The Merriam-Webster citation file includes more than a thousand examples of the use of refugee collected since the early 1980’s, and in none of those examples is refugee used to describe U.S. citizens displaced by a storm or other natural disaster.

In almost all cases, the word is used either figuratively (“refugees from the dot.com revolution,” “refugees from the heat and humidity;” hence the ongoing need for the general definition), or it is used in accordance with the second definition listed above: “a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution.”

One point was generally missed in the debate. It is not true, as some suggested, that refugee is only used to describe the poor or those lacking high social status. Refugee has been regularly used and is still used to refer to the many Europeans – of all levels of income, education, and social status – who fled the Nazis before and during World War II.

So you don’t have to be poor to be a refugee, but you usually do have to cross an international border.