The word "recession" has been kicked around for months and now, an even scarier term, "depression," has creeped back into the American vernacular following the recent stock market crash and a $700 billion government bailout of Wall Street.

So what officially determines whether the country is in a recession or depression?

Recession

According to the Web site economist.com, a recession is "a period of slow or negative economic growth, accompanied by unemployment."

The site said that economists generally have two precise definitions of a recession. The first, which they say is harder to prove, is when the economy is growing at less than its long-term growth and has spare capacity. Capacity is defined by the site as "the amount a company or an economy can produce using its current equipment, workers, capital and other resources at full tilt."

Secondly, recession is defined by economists as "two consecutive quarters of falling Gross Domestic Product" or GDP.

The GDP is a measure of economic activity in a country.

If a recession is long enough, it can slip into a depression.

Depression

Economically speaking, the word "depression" is most often associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was preceded by the Wall Street stock market crash on Oct. 29, 1929.

According to the economist.com, a depression is defined as "a bad, depressingly prolonged recession in economic activity."

Putting a recession and depression into perspective, the site noted that "textbook definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining output. A slump is where output falls by at least 10 percent; a depression is an even deeper and more prolonged slump."

Boiling down what led to and defined the Great Depression, the site said that following the great growth of the Roaring '20s and the Wall Street crash in 1929, output fell by 30 percent and unemployment soared and stayed high. As the Great Depression wound to its end a decade later, the unemployment rate was at 17 percent and nearly half of the nation's 25,000 banks had failed.