the.com/vegetarian
Someone who loves animals enough to let them keep living.
means A person whose diet excludes meat, and often fish, in favor of plant-based foods.
from Coined in the mid-1800s, likely built on 'vegetable' but stretched to suggest 'vegetus,' Latin for lively or vigorous — a deliberate nudge that eating this way wasn't deprivation but vitality. The word got its big public push when the Vegetarian Society formed in England in 1847, cementing the term in everyday use rather than leaving it a scientific curiosity.
- origin myth
- word predates vegetable in that sense, not from it
- loophole
- cheese and eggs still fair game, oddly
- global reality
- most of history ate meat rarely anyway
- fastest growth
- driven more by climate math than ethics now