Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Eugenics
/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/noun
The discredited project of improving a population by controlling who is allowed to reproduce.
The Greek roots
εὖ
eû
well, good
γένος
génos
birth, stock
Literally: “good breeding”
The story of the word
Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in Inquiries into Human Faculty, from εὐγενής, well-born, and meant selective breeding applied to people. The word carried scientific respectability for fifty years, with university chairs and learned societies, until sterilisation laws and then Nazi race policy made it unusable. The Greek adjective had meant nothing more sinister than noble birth.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1883
Same family
eulogyeuphemismgenealogygenetics
In a sentence
The archive shows how respectable eugenics once was, which is the uncomfortable part.