Tariffs are President Trump's favorite word. That's not an exaggeration.
"I always say 'tariffs' is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary," he said at a rally just hours after his inauguration in January. "Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It's going to bring our country's businesses back that left us."
His second administration hit the ground running with a series of threatened, imposed and delayed import duties, originally targeting Canada, Mexico, Colombia and China, as well as products including steel, cars and car parts.
Ever since, talk, threats and fears of tariffs have continued to dominate the discourse — in the U.S. and around the world — especially in the wake of Trump's "Liberation Day" announcement.
Those tariffs — a baseline minimum of 10% on all imports, plus additional taxes on goods from dozens of countries — sent markets tumbling and recession fears soaring after they were unveiled last week. They prompted criticism from Wall Street and world leaders, and they brought multiple countries to the negotiating table, despite Trump's insistence that they will not be paused.
Mainstream economists have long criticized tariffs as a barrier to free trade that disproportionately burdens low-income U.S. consumers. But Trump maintains that tariffs are key to protecting American jobs and products, raising revenue, rebalancing the global trading system and alternately punishing and extracting concessions from other countries.
"It's my favorite word," he said at an October 2024 event. "It needs a public relations firm to help it, but to me it's the most beautiful word in the dictionary."
This raises the question: How did "tariff" get its name? The word itself — like most in English — is actually an import.
Where did the word come from?
"Tariff" literally means "a schedule of duties imposed by a government on imported or in some countries exported goods," or the "duty or rate of duty imposed in such a schedule," according to Merriam-Webster.
The word originally referred to a list of prices in the context of shipping, linguist and content creator Adam Aleksic told NPR.
"It had the implication of a guy at a dock with a table [of prices], and he would charge goods as they came in by the good, based on their value in the table," he said.
The word can be traced back to Latin as well as the Arabic word "taʽrīf," meaning "notification" or "inventory."
Global trade disseminated variations of the word into other languages, including French, Italian and Persian, before it made its way to English in the 16th century. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of "tariff" to 1592.
"There was a lot of trading with the Arabic world, which led to financial and mathematical terms being borrowed into Latin and then eventually into English," Aleksic said.
Perhaps ironically, it's quite a global journey for a word nowadays associated with isolationism. But Aleksic says the path it took is not actually that unusual.
"Even words that were traced back to Old English eventually come from Proto-Indo-European," he explains. "So all language is imported, in that sense."
How has the word been used over time?
Tariffs have been central to U.S. trade policy since the country's founding.
"The second act passed by Congress was a tariff act," Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, told NPR's Planet Money. "And that's because the most important problem that was facing the country was the government had no money."
The Tariff Act of 1789 — which President George Washington signed on July 4 — placed a 5% tax on all imports for the express purpose of protecting domestic manufacturing and raising revenue for the federal government.
By the mid-1800s, however, the goals of U.S. tariffs started to shift from revenue to restriction.
"U.S. industry had begun to grow up during this period," Irwin explained. "Steel producers and others wanted to keep foreign steel and foreign textiles out of the U.S. market."
The federal government passed the Tariff of 1828 — at a rate as high as 49% — in response to lobbying from Northern manufacturers who wanted to protect fledgling U.S. industries from British competition, according to the Bill of Rights Institute.
But it was incredibly unpopular among Southern planters, who relied on European trade and had little to do with domestic manufacturing. They gave it another name: the Tariff of Abominations.
"Basically, people were as upset about tariffs as some are today," Aleksic said. "In the South particularly, people were having this protectionist attitude against tariffs that may honestly be still currently informing our discourse downstream."
South Carolina declared in 1832 that it would nullify the tariff within its borders. That caused a conflict between the state and federal government known as the Nullification Crisis, which ended only with the passage of the Compromise Tariff of 1833 — and foreshadowed the Civil War.
Tariffs had made up some 90% of U.S. government revenue before the Civil War, but that figure decreased to around 50% with the advent of new taxes to fund the war effort, according to History.com. Tariffs became even less important revenue sources after the introduction of the income tax in 1913, but they were increasingly used to protect domestic industries from competition.
The controversial Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 raised tariffs on a wide range of imports by an average of 20%, which prompted retaliatory tariffs from many other countries and significantly disrupted global trade. While the tariffs didn't single-handedly cause the Great Depression, many economists believe they exacerbated the United States' financial downturn — and many policymakers saw the tariffs as a mistake.
The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 is seen as ushering in a new era of trade policy focused on negotiating lower tariff rates to promote freer and fairer trade. It continued into the postwar period and beyond, leading to the creation of the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s.
All of this history matters today, Aleksic says, pointing to the political — and patriotic — connotations of the word.
"When Trump says the word 'tariff,' he's not using the word in isolation — he's using it in the context of all the tariffs that have happened in U.S. history," he says. "All the cultural context of what it means to be American, in the context of tariffs, is something that people carry with them, regardless of whether they actually know that those tariffs were around."
Why does the word matter today?
While the United States' policies on tariffs have evolved over the centuries, the meaning of the word has effectively remained the same. But Aleksic says it may be starting to change.
He points to Trump's use of the term "reciprocal tariffs" to describe the country-specific taxes he is levying against nations across Europe, Asia and the rest of the world.
"Reciprocal" implies that these tariffs match the tariffs imposed by those countries, but it's a bit of a misnomer here: The White House's math reveals they do not actually correspond to the exact tariff rates in other countries.
"[Trump is] not using 'tariff' in that historical sense of a set price going down in an arithmetic table," Aleksic said. "He's instead using it as general economic punishment or, I guess in the literal White House definition, trade deficit over total goods imported."
In other words, the definition of "tariff" seems to be widening beyond simply a rate of tax. Aleksic calls this an example of "semantic broadening," which happens all the time in language and isn't inherently cause for concern from a linguistics point of view.
That doesn't mean it's not noteworthy.
"One should be aware when words change meaning in politics, because they're often being used as loaded language or dog whistles or buzzwords," he said. "And I think there's part of 'tariff' right now that is a political buzzword for sure."
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