Dreyfus

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer whose wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 sparked a major national scandal
2. A French army captain of Jewish descent, wrongly convicted of espionage in the late nineteenth century, whose case divided France
3. The surname of a French military officer whose false treason conviction and later exoneration became a famous symbol of injustice

Etymology: Dreyfus is a family name, and in English it survives almost only as a surname rather than as a common word with a separate sense of its own. Its meaning as a word therefore lies in the family that carried it, not in any change of sense over time.