The Ubiquitous Tranche.

Jesse McKinley writes for the NY Times (archived) about a word that is apparently showing up all over the place:

With roots in the Renaissance and a long history of use by economists, tranche has been given new prominence in recent weeks as writers and pundits seek to describe the some three million pages released by the Justice Department in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and financier.

In the month since the Jan. 30 release, there have been tranches heard on the radio, on television, online and in print. There have been descriptions of “massive” and “enormous” tranches, “giant” and “voluminous” tranches, and — conversely — “small” tranches inside big tranches. There have been “recent” tranches and “new” tranches and “possibly last” tranches. There have been Spanish-language tranches (“tramo,” roughly) and, of course, French tranches, a natural outgrowth of its ancestry as a French verb, trancher, meaning to slice.

In English, tranche has made the leap from verb to noun, and is generally defined as a portion of a larger whole. […]

Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, said that the word’s current prominence was reflective of a phenomenon known as “lexical touch-off,” which she credited to the sociologist Harvey Sacks. That theory holds that when people hear a word in a conversation — including an unusual or unexpected word — they then find themselves repeating it. Dr. Tannen also noted that tranche’s use may be fueled by “verbal inflation,” whereby the meaning of a word expands beyond its initial definition, often diluting its impact.

The term “tranche de vie,” or “slice of life,” has long referred to an artistic form known to represent everyday existence. The word has also long been common in the world of finance, and it got some major big-screen exposure in the 2015 movie “The Big Short,” based on the Michael Lewis best seller. That film was peppered with tranches, including in a crucial early scene where a trader played by Ryan Gosling explains why mortgage-backed securities — and the housing market — are likely to implode. (Spoiler: They did.)

Google shows that the word initially began gaining popularity in books in the 1960s, peaking in the mid-1990s and again around 2008 (around the aforementioned collapse of the housing market). The word also appears hundreds of times in the Epstein files themselves, which is not surprising considering Mr. Epstein worked in finance for decades.

Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and author of “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries,” said that use of the word tranche was accelerated by the Covid pandemic and the associated financial measures. “‘Tranche’ got used a ton to refer to reserves of vaccines,” she said, noting its use started to decline in 2024 “when most pandemic measures wound down.”

This latest round is not tranche’s first brush with fame. In 2009, the New York Times columnist William Safire identified it as “the hot word in the lexicon of this year’s unprecedented budget stimulus,” which may well have been the only time that phrase has ever been written. Mr. Safire, a onetime political speechwriter and “oracle of language” who died in 2009, also noted its relation to the word “trench,” and predicted a batch of puns involving “tranche warfare.”

Anne Curzan, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Michigan, said some people fluent in financial jargon were now using tranche as both a noun and a verb: to tranche, meaning to distribute something in tranches, taking the word back to its Gallic-verb days. […]

Adam Aleksic, an author and linguist who posts as the Etymology Nerd on social media, predicted that the continued digging into the Epstein files meant that “we’re probably going to see more of tranche,” adding that many people love a French term, what with the way it makes you sound super-sophisticated and stuff. “We like Latin words more than Germanic words for sounding pretentious,” he said, adding that tranche “sounds more institutionally prestigious.”

“It sounds,” he added, “like you know what you’re talking about.”

The OED only takes it back to French trancher ‘to cut,’ but Wiktionary suggests that’s “possibly from Vulgar Latin *trinicāre (‘cut in three parts’).” I’m not sure I’ve ever had occasion to use the word tranche, but I have nothing against its (presumably temporary) popularity; I just wish the NYT would italicize words used as examples, which would make such discussions clearer. Oh, and cuchuflete, who sent me the article, says “Interesting that the article omits the IT synonym, ‘batch’.” Gracias, pibe!