Over the weekend, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged that he had an affair with a woman who US intelligence officials had separately suspected was a spy for the Chinese government, setting off an ongoing corporate crisis at the chip-making behemoth.
You catch more trade secrets with honey than with vinegar, to paraphrase an old idiom. But when you do it, are you using a “honeypot”? Or is it a “honeytrap”?
As journalists and other observers processed the news that one of the world’s most powerful men might have fallen victim to an age-old spying tactic, they were divided on what to call it. References to honeypots and honeytraps both abounded — deployed as nouns or as verbs, and with or without a space between “honey” and the rest of the compound.
The “-trap” enthusiasts included CNN — “Was Nvidia’s CEO honey-trapped?” we asked in a video — and The Spectator, which proclaimed “Long live honeytraps!”
Elsewhere, “honeypot” was the word that stuck. “Nvidia Gets a Chinese Honeypot Lesson,” read the headline of a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Reuters opted for the two-word form, with the headline “Nvidia’s close-knit board comes under pressure with ‘honey pot’ test.” The American Prospect wrote of “The Honeypot That Might End the AI Boom,” going on to say in the article that the Nvidia boss “got honeypotted by a dadgummed Chinese spy.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” brings you the meaning behind the words in the news.
Was there a distinction between the “honeypot” and the “honeytrap”? In some instances, people used “honeypot” to refer to the woman accused of being a Chinese intelligence asset, and “honeytrap” for the alleged operation itself.
But plenty of others used both words interchangeably. “‘Honeypots’ or ‘honey traps’—positioning an alluring operative to seduce or develop a relationship with a key target—are one of intelligence’s most infamous and well-established strategies,” went one explanation in Wired .
Wordsmiths insisted that conflating the two terms was wrong.
“The normalization of ‘honeypot’ over honeytrap is the real scandal here,” Gady Epstein, a longform editor at The Economist, wrote on Bluesky . Merriam-Webster signaled where it stood on the issue by posting its entry for “honey trap,” defined as “a scheme in criminal activity or in espionage that involves using the possibility of a romantic or sexual relationship to lure someone into a compromising position often for the purpose of blackmailing them.”
The practice of using seduction to obtain an advantage over an enemy goes back thousands of years. In the Bible, Samson falls in love with Delilah, who the Philistines bribed with silver to ascertain the source of Samson’s superhuman strength.
But the use of the “honey-” words for it is much more recent. “Honeytrap,” in the sense of the espionage operation, sounds like timeworn cloak-and-dagger professional jargon, but it was made up by the author John le Carré, in his 1974 novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” In 1976, le Carré said in a BBC interview that a “honeytrap” is “where you put a girl in a chap’s way; it’s a sexual enticement operation.”
“John Le Carré” was a pseudonym used by the former British intelligence officer David Cromwell, because the government prohibited agents from publishing under their own names. He was likewise required to avoid revealing real tradecraft — and so, he told the BBC interviewer, he had invented a whole fictional vocabulary for the profession, using words like “honeytrap,’ “lamplighters,” and “scalphunters” that actual intelligence officers had never heard of.
The premise of the “honeytrap” proved irresistible for spy novelists and tabloid journalists, who often based their depictions on dubious accounts from intelligence agents, journalist Henry Schlesinger wrote in a 2022 article. Women enlisted to carry out such schemes were frequently portrayed in pop culture as femme fatales, even as real life operations were less salacious, he wrote. But the trope stuck, and over the years, the word “honeytrap” did, too.
What, then, of the “honeypot”? The Oxford English Dictionary traces it back to around 1475, when it appeared in the English-Latin dictionary “Catholicon Anglicum” to describe a vessel for holding the sticky nectar concentrate produced by bees.
Over time, “honeypot” developed a number of other meanings: In the early 17th century, it was used to refer to an alluring or tempting person, whether the tempter had ulterior motives or not. “A Whore entring into a Prison is a Hony-pot about which all the flyes come buzzing, as Crowes to a Carrion,” English writer Geffray Mynshul wrote in his satirical “Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners.”
In the latter half of the 17th century, the word was also invoked as a euphemism for female genitals. “Honeypot” would additionally come to describe a player in a Scottish children’s game, a type of ant and a makeshift toilet.
As “honeytrap” took hold as a term for an intelligence operation involving romance or sex, “honeypot” emerged in the ’90s as a term for a different but conceptually similar kind of temptation: a decoy website or network set up to as a false target to catch cybercriminals.
Somewhere along the way, people apparently started to use the two words interchangeably to refer to the seduction scheme. This has been happening for at least 15 years, based on a 2011 entry for “honeypot” in Urban Dictionary, which defined it as “a sting operation that involves one going undercover to seduce an (usually high profile) individual into a compromising position for future extortion purposes.”
Why the two words were conflated is less clear. Sreemoy Talukdar, an editor for the Indian news website Firstpost, chalked it up to a frustrating Yankeeism. “Why do Americans have to invent a new word for everything?” he wrote on X. “Pavement is sidewalk. Spectacles are eyeglasses. And now we have ‘honeypot’ for honeytrap.”
But does it really matter whether you call it a “honeypot” or a “honeytrap”? The Museum of English Rural Life, an authority on another kind of honeypot, made light of the distinction while also using it. After joining the excitement of the Jensen Huang news cycle by sharing an image of a honey-storing vessel from its collection on its Bluesky account, the museum responded to persnickety critics who accused it of using the incorrect term.
“To all the people arguing in our mentions that it’s honeytrap not honeypot: congratulations, you have been caught in The Museum of English Rural Life’s honeypot honeytrap.”
