Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Panopticon
/pænˈɒptɪkən/noun
A prison design in which one guard can watch every cell unseen, and by extension any system of total surveillance.
The Greek roots
πᾶν
pân
all
ὀπτικόν
optikón
of seeing
Literally: “all-seeing”
The story of the word
Jeremy Bentham published the plan in 1791: a ring of cells around a central tower, lit so that every prisoner is visible while no prisoner can tell whether anyone is watching. He described it as a mill for grinding rogues honest and spent decades failing to get one built in England. Foucault took it up in 1975 as the model of modern power in general, and since then the word has meant surveillance more often than architecture.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1791
Same family
opticpanoramasynopsisautopsy
In a sentence
The office redesign turned the open plan into a panopticon and productivity did not improve.
Presidio Modelo in Cuba is the best-preserved panopticon prison anywhere.