Thursday, June 3, 2010

spillionaire

spillionaire = spill + millionaire

A spillionaire is a lawyer who makes a ton of money suing or defending big oil following an oil spill, or a person who receives a large settlement because of an oil spill.

I had presumed that this was coined recently in the wake of the BP oiling-the-Gulf fiasco, but Word Spy has a citation from 1999, referring to the Exxon Valdez spill.