The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god. Its Latin form (holocaustum) was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes in the 1190s. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.

The biblical word Shoah (also spelled Sho'ah and Shoa), meaning "calamity," became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s. Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word holocaust, as a Greek pagan custom.

The word holocaust has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people. For example, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I. Since the 1950s its use has increasingly been restricted, with its usage now mainly used as a proper noun to describe the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi party.

Holocaust was adopted as a translation of Shoah—a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster, and destruction —which was used in 1940 in Jerusalem in a booklet called Sho'at Yehudei Polin, and translated as The Holocaust of the Jews of Poland. Shoah had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of catastrophe; for example, in 1934, Chaim Weizmann told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler's rise to power was an "unvorhergesehene Katastrophe, etwa ein neuer Weltkrieg" ("an unforeseen catastrophe, perhaps even a new world war"); the Hebrew press translated Katastrophe as Shoah. In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used Shoah in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe's Jews, calling it a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people

The word Shoah was chosen in Israel to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot, the national day of remembrance. In the 1950s, Yad Vashem was routinely translating this into English as "the Disaster"; at that time, holocaust was often used to mean the conflagration of much of humanity in a nuclear war. Since then, Yad Vashem has changed its practice; the word Holocaust, usually now capitalized, has come to refer principally to the genocide of the European Jews.

The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust". For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah. An attempt by the German TV documentarian Guido Knopp in 2000 to "Germanize" the term by spelling it Holokaust has not yet been successful.

The word holocaust is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include the killing of around half a million migrant Romani peoples, the Roma and Sinti, the deaths of several million Soviet prisoners of war, along with slave laborers, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and a vast assortment of perceived potential troublemakers and political opponents. The use of the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.

Camp Name	Country	Type	Dates of use	Prisoners	Deaths (approx)
Amersfoort	Netherlands	Prison and transit camp	Aug 1941 - Apr 1945	35,000	1,000
Arbeitsdorf	Germany	Labour camp	8 Apr 1942 - 11 Oct 1942		min. 600
Auschwitz Birkenau	Poland	Extermination and labour camp	Apr 1940 - Jan 1945	400,000	1,100,000 - 1,500,000
Banjica	Serbia	Concentration camp	Jun 1941 - Sep 1944	min. 23,637
Bardufoss	Norway	Concentration camp	Mar 1944 - ????	800	250
Betzec	Poland	Extermination camp	Mar 1942 - Jun 1943		at least 434,508
Bergen - Belsen	Germany	Collection point	Apr 1943 - Apr 1945		70,000
Berlin - Marzahn	Germany	Early a "rest place" then labour camp for Roma	July 1936 -
Bolzano	Italy	Transit	Jul 1944 - Apr 1945	11,116
Bredtvet	Norway	Concentration camp	Fall, 1941 - May, 1945	1,000 or more	????
Breendonk	Belgium	Prison and labour camp	20 Sep 1940 - Sep 1944	min. 3532	min. 391
Breitenau	Germany	"Early wild camp", then labour camp	Jun 1933 - Mar 1934,1940 - 1945	470 - 8500
Buchenwald	Germany	Labour camp	Jul 1937 - Apr 1945	250,000	56,000
Kulmhof	Poland	Extermination camp	Dec 1941 - Apr 1943,Apr 1944 - Jan 1945		at least 153,000
Crveni krst	Serbia	Concentration camp	1941 - 1945	30,000	12,300
Dachau	Germany	Labour camp	Mar 1933 - Apr 1945	200,000	31,591
Falstad	Norway	Prison camp	Dec 1941 - May 1945		min. 200
Flossenbürg	Germany	Labour camp	May 1938 - Apr 1945	min. 100,000	30,000
Grini	Norway	Prison camp	2 May 1941 - May 1945	19,788	8
Gross - Rosen	Poland	Labour camp; Nacht und Nebel camp	Aug 1940 - Feb 1945	125,000	40,000
KZ Herzogenbusch(Vught)	Netherlands	Prison and transit camp	1943 - Summer 1944	31,000	750
Hinzert	Germany	Collective point and subcamp	Jul 1940 - Mar 1945	14,000	min. 302
Janowska (Lwów)	Ukraine	Ghetto; transit, labour, & extermination camp	Sep 1941 - Nov 1943		min. 40,000
Kaiserwald (Mezaparks)	Latvia	Labour camp	1942 - 6 Aug 1944	20,000?
Kaufering/Landsberg	Germany	Labour camp	Jun 1943 - Apr 1945	30,000	min.14,500
Kauen (Kaunas)	Lithuania	Ghetto and internment camp	????
Klooga	Estonia	Labour camp	Summer 1943 - 28 Sep 1944		2,400
Lager Sylt (Alderney)	Channel Islands	Labour camp	Mar 1943 - Jun 1944	1,000?	460
Langenstein - Zwieberge	Germany	Buchenwald subcamp camp	Apr 1944 - Apr 1945	5,000	2,000
Le Vernet	France	Internment camp	1939 - 1944
Majdanek(KZ Lublin)	Poland	Extermination camp	Jul 1941 - Jul 1944		78,000
Malchow	Germany	Labour and Transit camp	Winter 1943 - 8 May 1945	5,000
Maly Trostenets	Belarus	Extermination camp	Jul 1941 - Jun 1944		65,000
Mauthausen - Gusen	Austria	Labour camp	Aug 1938 - May 1945	195,000	min. 95,000
Mittelbau - Dora	Germany	Labour camp	Sep 1943 - Apr 1945	60,000	min. 20,000
Natzweiler - Struthof	France	Labour camp; Nacht und Nebel camp	May 1941 - Sep 1944	40,000	25,000
Neuengamme	Germany	Labour camp	13 Dec 1938 - 4 May 1945	106,000	55,000
Niederhagen	Germany	Prison and labour camp	Sep 1941 - early 1943	3,900	1,285
Oranienburg	Germany	Collective point	Mar 1933 - Jul 1934	3,000	min. 16
Osthofen	Germany	Collective point	Mar 1933 - Jul 1934
P?aszów	Poland	Labour camp	Dec 1942 - Jan 1945	min. 150,000	min. 9,000
Ravensbrück	Germany	Labour camp for women	May 1939 - Apr 1945	150,000	min. 90,000
Risiera di San Sabba (Trieste)	Italy	Police detainment camp	Sep 1943 - 29 Apr 1945	25,000	5,000
Sachsenhausen	Germany	Labour camp	Jul 1936 - Apr 1945	min. 200,000	100,000
Sajmiste	Serbia	Extermination camp	December 1941 - September 1944		100,000
Salaspils	Latvia	Labour camp	Oct 1941 - Summer 1944		101,000
Sobibór	Poland	Extermination camp	May 1942 - Oct 1943		up to 200,000
Soldau	Poland	Labour; Transit camp	Winter 1939/40 - Jan 1945	30,000	13,000
Stutthof	Poland	Labour camp	Sep 1939 - May 1945	110,000	65,000
Theresienstadt (Terezín)	Czech Republic	Transit camp and Ghetto	Nov 1941 - May 1945	140,000	min. 35,000
Treblinka	Poland	Extermination camp	Jul 1942 - Nov 1943		870,000
Vaivara	Estonia	Concentration and transit camp	15 Sep 1943 - 29 Feb 1944	20,000	950
Warsaw	Poland	Labour and extermination camp	1942 - 1944	up to 40,000	up to 200,000
Westerbork	Netherlands	Collective point	May 1940 - Apr 1945	102,000