• Today's Word

Egalitarian

🔊 Listen to the word Egalitarian

ih-gal-ih-TAIR-ee-un

Definition

(adjective/noun) Believing in or based on the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

Example

The new policy was genuinely egalitarian in a way the company’s previous efforts hadn’t been — not equal in appearance but equal in effect, which is a much harder thing to achieve.

Word Origin

Egalitarian derives from the French égalitaire, from égalité meaning “equality” — itself from the Latin aequalis, meaning “equal,” from aequus meaning “level” or “even.” The same root gives us equal, equity, adequate, and equanimity — a family of words all built around the idea of evenness and balance. It entered English in the 19th century, shaped by the political upheavals of the French Revolution, whose rallying cry of liberté, égalité, fraternité made equality a central organizing principle of modern political thought.

 

Fun Fact

The tension between egalitarian ideals and human psychology has fascinated researchers for decades — and the findings are consistently humbling. Studies consistently show that people who explicitly endorse egalitarian values still demonstrate measurable implicit biases in hiring, lending, and social judgment. The gap between stated belief and actual behavior is so consistent and so large that psychologists have given it its own name — the intention-behavior gap — and entire fields of study are devoted to understanding why believing in equality and practicing it turn out to be such different cognitive tasks. The word is easier to hold than the principle.