This Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for February 22–February 28, 2026

Rescuers were worried by the obliging, almost polite behavior of an injured bald eagle as they freed it from a chunk of ice in the Hudson River. The fact that the giant bird was so accommodating during the rescue, rather than struggling and attacking with its talons as a healthy eagle might, made the rescuers suspect it had been poisoned. However, once the eagle had been taken to a sanctuary and stabilized, it was able to eat normally and showed hopeful signs of recovery.

A new contract deal that includes raises and layoff protections brought the last contingent of striking New York City nurses back to work. In January, about 15,000 nurses from several different hospitals went on strike, but most had since returned to work. More than 4,000 nurses at New York-Presbyterian Hospital were the final group to continue striking. They returned to work for the first time this Thursday, after 41 days walking the picket line together in freezing temperatures.

The U.S. women's ice hockey team, which has medaled in every Winter Olympics since the sport was introduced in 1998, won a gold medal thanks to a dauntless overtime performance. Team USA resolutely refused to be cowed by their opponents, despite Canada's record of winning the gold in five out of the last eight Winter Games. The U.S. team worked steadfastly to even the score in the third period, and four minutes into a thrilling overtime, to score the final winning point.

As the U.S. faces a glut of office buildings and a dearth of housing, some developers are converting offices to living spaces. Since the pandemic, office vacancy rates have averaged 20 percent nationwide. At the same time, housing scarcity has reached crisis levels, with up to seven million units needed. Converting empty offices into homes can't solve the problem alone, but it's faster and cheaper than building new housing. The Old English root of dearth means "precious."

Osaka, Japan, received an anonymous gift of gold bars weighing 46 pounds and valued at $3.6 million. The donation was accompanied by a request that the money be used to fix the city’s dilapidated water pipes. Last year, there were 92 reported leaks in the vast, aging system of pipes under Osaka's public roads. The gold bars will enable the city to repair about 1.2 miles of decrepit water pipes. Dilapidated is derived from a Latin root meaning "to squander or waste."

Denmark's Arctic command forces evacuated a U.S. Navy sailor from a submarine off the coast of Greenland for urgent medical treatment. The crew member's name and condition were not disclosed, but the situation was so exigent that the submarine stopped its mission and surfaced so that a Danish Defense Seahawk helicopter could airlift the sailor to a hospital in Nuuk. The Latin root of exigent is exigere, "demand."

The White House announced it will release files related to extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects. President Trump said he had told officials to begin making the files public, though he did not offer a timeline for when they would be available. The Pentagon has previously stated that no evidence shows aliens have visited Earth, or that the government has covered up knowledge of extraterrestrial technology. Extraterrestrial's roots mean "outside Earth."

As the cost of cocoa has increased, the candy brand Reese’s, owned by the Hershey Company, has been quietly replacing its milk chocolate with an artificially flavored coating in many of its candies. The faux chocolate is used to make Valentine's Day Reese's mini hearts and foil-wrapped peanut butter eggs. Ingredients for the seasonal candies include "chocolate-flavored coating," which can't legally be referred to as milk chocolate. In French, faux means "false."

Linguists were surprised by the results of a study showing that baby chickens, like humans, associate the nonsense word "bouba" with roundness, and "kiki" with spikiness. The well-known "bouba-kiki" effect has been studied in infant humans for decades, and some researchers associate it with the emergence of language. Experts say the findings, while they do not suggest that the chicks have human language, show the existence of a shared type of perception that evolved into speech in humans.

A blizzard this week caused treacherous conditions across the East Coast. Millions of people were forced to stay home from work or school as the massive snowstorm dumped as much as three feet of snow in some areas, making it unsafe to travel on roads. Powerful wind gusts caused low visibility and dangerous windchills. Hundreds of cars were stranded on roads, and wet snow brought down trees and power lines throughout southern New England, leaving more than 600,000 residents without power.