British origins und development, 17th to 19th c. The first recorded usage of the suffix
ism as a separate word in its own right was in 1680. By the nineteenth century it was being used by
Thomas Carlyle to signify a pre-packaged
ideology. It was later used in this sense by such writers as
Julian Huxley and
George Bernard Shaw. This is the state of affairs characterized by
Andreas Dorschel: "An 'ism', the modern political manifestation of living in terms of options, only ever makes sense within a field of possibilities between which one can, and indeed must, choose. In 19th century politics, they ranged from socialism to liberalism to conservatism; mutually, but also polemically within their own camps, they were all pretty much the best of enemies."
United States of America, 19th c. In the United States of the mid-nineteenth century, the phrase "the isms" was used as a collective derogatory term to lump together the radical social reform movements of the day (such as
slavery abolitionism,
feminism,
alcohol prohibitionism,
Fourierism,
pacifism, Technoism, early
socialism, etc.) and various spiritual or religious movements considered non-mainstream by the standards of the time (such as
transcendentalism,
spiritualism,
Mormonism etc.).
American South, 19th c. Southerners often prided themselves on the American South being free from all of these pernicious "isms" (except for alcohol temperance campaigning, which was compatible with a traditional Protestant focus on individual morality). So on September 5 and 9, 1856, the
Examiner newspaper of
Richmond, Virginia, ran editorials on "Our Enemies, the Isms and their Purposes", while in 1858
Parson Brownlow called for a "Missionary Society of the South, for the Conversion of the Freedom Shriekers, Spiritualists, Free-lovers, Fourierites, and
Infidel Reformers of the North" (see
The Freedom-of-thought Struggle in the Old South by
Clement Eaton).
Western world, 20th to 21st c. In the present day, the term appears in the title of a standard survey of political thought, ''Today's Isms'' by William Ebenstein, first published in the 1950s, and now in its 11th edition. Skeptics of any given -isms can quote the dictum attributed to
Eisenhower: "All -isms are wasms". In 2004, the
Oxford English Dictionary added two new draft definitions of -isms to reference their relationship to words that convey injustice: • "Forming nouns with the sense 'belief in the superiority of one—over another'; as
racism,
sexism,
speciesism, etc." • "Forming nouns with the sense '
discrimination or
prejudice against on the basis of—'; as
ageism, bodyism,
heightism, faceism,
lookism,
sizeism,
weightism, etc." In December 2015,
Merriam-Webster Dictionary declared -ism to be the Word of the Year. ==See also==