diaspora

Word Story
The history of the term diaspora shows how a word's meaning can spread from a very specific sense to encompass much broader ones.
Diaspora first entered English in the late 19th century to describe the scattering of Jews after their captivity in Babylonia in the 5th century B.C.E. The term originates from the Greek diasporá, meaning “a dispersion or scattering,” found in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible (Deuteronomy 25). While this specific historical sense is still used, especially in scholarly writing, modern-day definitions of the Jewish Diaspora (often with an initial capital letter) can refer to the displacement of Jews at other times during their history, especially after the Holocaust in the 20th century. The term can also refer generally to Jews living today outside of Israel.
Diaspora also has been applied to the similar experiences of other peoples who have been forced from their homelands; for example, to the trans-Atlantic passage of Africans under the slave trade of the 17th through 19th centuries, which has been called the African Diaspora.
More recently, we find a scattering of the meaning of diaspora, which can now be used to refer not only to a group of people, but also to some aspect of their culture, as in “the global diaspora of American-style capitalism.”

Popular References

—“To the Diaspora”: A 1981 poem by African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks.
—Diaspora: A 1997 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan.