Word of the Week: What makes the Trump administration’s Operation Epic Fury so ‘epic’?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — On February 28, about an hour after President Donald Trump announced that the US had launched attacks against Iran, the Department of Defense — which now calls itself the “Department of War” — dubbed the hostilities “Operation Epic Fury.”

The word “epic” is rooted in high art and classical antiquity. But to 21st century American ears, its use as an intensifier had rather different overtones: calling the military operation “epic” put it in the realm of bro-speak, the sort of thing one might hear from a frat boy or a video game developer. Late-night comedians likened “Epic Fury” to “a Jackie Chan movie released directly to streaming,” “a new Mountain Dew” or “another energy drink” from Jake and Logan Paul. Others wondered whether it was a coincidence that “Epic Fury” bore the same initials as “Epstein Files.” (Adding to the air of unseriousness, an early press release from a GOP congressman contained the unfortunate typo “Operation Epic Furry.”)

“Epic” comes via Latin from the Greek epos meaning word, story or song, and it was first used in the late 1500s to describe long poems about heroes doing heroic things. Initially a term for orally recited poems such as the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” over time it came to refer to any large or sweeping work. From there, “epic” evolved into an adjective denoting the grandiose characteristics of that kind of literature.

In the ’80s, “epic” became slang for “cool” or “excellent,” in the same way earlier or later generations might have used “boss,” “groovy” or “banging,” says Grant Barrett, a linguist and lexicographer who hosts the public radio show “A Way With Words.” Like “awesome,” it shed its original sense of profundity in the process. Today, the Oxford English Dictionary also defines “epic” in a colloquial sense as “particularly impressive or remarkable.”

The operation’s name, then, continues the Pentagon’s practice, under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, of veering rhetorically between military jargon like “kinetic” and internet-brawler aggression like “FAFO.” If “epic fury” is meant to convey a great magnitude of aggression, Barrett says it also evokes the internet-era expression for when someone crashes and burns spectacularly: “I think for most people, it calls to mind ‘epic fail.’”

Operation Epic Fury is “classic Hegseth,” says Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “He’s all about warrior ethos. He’s about lethality. He’s about … trying to instill fear in adversaries,” he adds.

Military operation names can be designed to shape public perception at home and abroad, though they didn’t originate for that purpose. The Germans are thought to have introduced code names for operations during World War I, and the US military adopted the practice for security in World War II, using more random words that remained classified until after the war’s end, Lt. Col. Gregory C. Sieminski wrote in a 1995 article titled “The Art of Naming Operations.”

It wasn’t until the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Sieminski wrote, that US military leaders realized how the names of combat operations could affect morale among the troops and the public — 1951’s Operation Killer, for example, appeared to be a powerful motivator for soldiers but proved off-putting to civilians back home. That led the US to implement a computer system known as NICKA to automate the assignment of names, which helps produce two-word combinations that are often used for military exercises or tests today: “Cobra Gold” for a set of exercises in Thailand, or “Focus Lens” for joint South Korean–US exercises.

While NICKA might be used for more routine military activities, Cancian says more serious operations are given more deliberate names.

Operation Epic Fury evokes Ronald Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada, deemed Operation Urgent Fury. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, titled Operation Desert Storm, conjured a similar intensity. Other names carried loftier ambitions. George H.W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama was drawn up as Operation Blue Spoon, then changed to Operation Just Cause — though that bid to dignify the highly optional invasion ended with it being roundly mocked as “Just Because.” Similarly moralistic monikers were used in the war in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom). And some names have been downright dull: The US war against ISIS was Operation Inherent Resolve.

Winston Churchill, who had a lot of opinions about war operation names, once warned that operations in which many men could die “ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment.” He also advised against using names that might later be considered embarrassing. “After all, the world is wide, and intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names which do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called ‘Bunnyhug’ or ‘Ballyhoo,’” he said.

On the one hand, Operation Epic Fury seems more abstract than other military monikers from this administration. The June 2025 US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities were labeled Operation Midnight Hammer; Operation Southern Spear is the campaign in the Caribbean and the Pacific that Trump administration officials say is intended to curb drug trafficking.

But on the other hand, “epic” fury fits within Trump’s long-established habit of hyperbole. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” he said in his 1987 book “The Art of The Deal.” Hegseth called Operation Epic Fury “the most lethal, most complex, and most-precision aerial operation in history,” words that were recently echoed by Trump.

Like the word “epic,” “fury” also has classical origins, Barrett notes. In Greek and Roman mythology, the Furies were goddesses of vengeance and retribution, called on to punish heinous crimes such as murder; now, the word is used more generally to mean fierce passion or rage. Given that Trump characterized Iran’s supreme leader as “evil” in his justifications for the attacks, invoking the Furies in an operation to dismantle the regime could conceivably have been interpreted as poetic.

Did any of that cross Hegseth’s mind when naming Operation Epic Fury? Barrett has his doubts.

“I don’t think that there is anybody currently at the top of the War Department who has that classical education to understand that,” he said. “I think more than likely for them, fury is something that they pulled from a movie like ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ or something like that.”

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