Holliday also happened to volunteer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as a college student in 2008. And she saw a bump in the usage of the word around that time.

“I started to see a lot of people that I knew get frustrated because they felt like he wasn’t as far to the left as they had expected,” she said. “And so I think there were on the ground just some sort of people saying, ‘You know, I don’t really identify so much with what I think the Democratic Party stands for, or what mainstream liberals stand for.'”

That means the word “liberal” has been assailed over the years not only by the right, by Republicans who effectively made the word into an insult, but also the left, by anti-establishment left-leaners who wanted to distinguish themselves from other Democrats.

The frustration with establishment Democrats like Obama — the sense that they were insufficiently leftist and insufficiently bold in their policymaking — in part set the stage for Bernie Sanders to run a liberal, anti-establishment candidacy, expanding the debate on a raft of issues to the left. He and Hillary Clinton sparred over the meaning of “progressive” at a 2016 debate, after Sanders said you couldn’t be both a moderate and a progressive.