When did veganism start? A history of the word and the movement

Veganism is eighty-something years old. Vegans are considerably older than that.

The word was invented in November 1944, in Leicester, by a group of six people tired of being called "non-dairy vegetarians". The practice they were describing, refusing eggs and dairy on ethical rather than dietary grounds, had been argued for in English since at least 1806. What 1944 gave it was a name, and with the name, something a person could join.

When was the word "vegan" invented?

November 1944. Donald Watson, then secretary of the Leicester Vegetarian Society, called a meeting with five other non-dairy vegetarians, among them Elsie Shrigley, to discuss what they were and what to call it. The Vegan Society dates its own founding to that meeting. That same month Watson began a newsletter, The Vegan News, subtitled "Quarterly Magazine of the Non-Dairy Vegetarians".

The name mattered more than it sounds. "Non-dairy vegetarian" is a description by subtraction: it tells you what someone has removed from an existing category. A group that cannot name itself without reference to another group has a hard time becoming a movement.

Where does the word come from?

From "vegetarian", compressed. Watson later described "vegan" as the first three and last two letters of the older word, or in his phrase, "the beginning and end of vegetarian".

The rejected alternatives are worth knowing, because they show how unsettled it was: dairyban, vitan and benevore were all considered. The Vegan Society's own history records that the word came together after early members George A. Henderson and his wife Fay K. Henderson suggested the society be called Allvega and the magazine Allvegan.

Here the record splits. The Society's account credits Watson with coining the word from the Hendersons' suggestion. Other accounts, including Watson's Wikipedia entry, credit Watson jointly with Dorothy Morgan, his then-future wife. Both versions circulate widely. The Society's is the primary source and is the one used here, but anyone claiming certainty about the exact moment of coinage is overstating what the record supports.

Were there vegans before the word existed?

Yes, by a long way.

The Vegan Society itself traces avoidance of animal products back more than two thousand years, to Pythagoras around 500 BCE and to the Buddha's discussions of vegetarian diets with his followers in roughly the same period. For most of European history "Pythagorean" was simply the word for what we would now call vegetarian.

The deepest continuous tradition sits elsewhere. Jainism, an Indian religion with archaeological traces reaching back to around 900 BCE, is built on ahimsa: non-violence toward every living thing. It is the organising principle of the whole religion, and the diet follows from it.

In practice that means Jain vegetarianism goes further than the European tradition ever did. No meat, fish or eggs. Most Jains also avoid root vegetables such as onion, garlic, potato and carrot, on the reasoning that uprooting the plant kills it outright and disturbs the organisms living in the soil around it. Some avoid eating after dark, to reduce the chance of harming insects drawn to a lamp. Digambara monks take the most austere line of all, eating once a day from a cupped hand.

Most Jains are lacto-vegetarian rather than vegan, and dairy has been part of the tradition for centuries, so this is not veganism under another name. But on the question of how far the principle of not harming should reach into what you eat, Jain practice was asking it two and a half thousand years before anyone in Leicester did.

The specifically vegan objection, that eggs and dairy are not exempt either, arrives much later. The Vegan Society names Dr William Lambe and Percy Bysshe Shelley, around 1806, as among the first Europeans to publicly object to eggs and dairy on ethical grounds. Lambe adopted a plant-only diet at forty, initially to treat his own chronic illness. That is 138 years before the word existed.

The Vegetarian Society was founded on 30 September 1847 at Northwood Villa in Ramsgate, Kent. For nearly a century after that, people who also refused dairy existed inside it as an awkward minority without a label. The 1944 meeting was that minority leaving.

When did veganism get its definition?

Five years after the word, and the wording most people quote took another four decades to settle.

The Vegan Society had a word from 1944 but no definition of it for five years. In 1949 Leslie J Cross pointed out the gap and proposed "the principle of the emancipation of animals from exploitation by man", later expanded to seek an end to the use of animals for food, commodities, work, hunting and vivisection.

The wording most people quote today came later still. The Society was first registered as a charity in August 1964, and became a limited company in December 1979. By winter 1988 the current definition was in use:

a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment.

The phrase doing the most work there is "as far as is possible and practicable". It does not appear in the 1951 formulation, which stated flatly that "the word veganism shall mean the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals". The modern wording is deliberately softer: a recognition that nobody living in an industrial economy achieves the absolute version.

How long have vegans been around?

Depends what you are counting. The word is eighty years old, the documented European argument against eggs and dairy is more than two centuries old, and the wider refusal of animal products runs into the thousands of years. The three answers sit far apart, and each is correct for its own question.

Donald Watson lived from 2 September 1910 to 16 November 2005, long enough to see the word he helped coin enter general use. He was 95.

What to take from this

If someone tells you veganism is a modern fad: the word is from 1944 and the ethical argument is documented from 1806. Neither is recent, and the underlying idea is older than the English language. What is genuinely modern is the availability: the supply chain rather than the principle.

If someone tells you veganism has always existed: that overstates it in the other direction. Ancient traditions avoided meat far more often than they avoided eggs and dairy. The specifically vegan position is a European argument roughly two centuries old, and an organised movement only since 1944.

The honest version is that a very old idea got a usable name eighty years ago, and spent the next forty-four years arguing about what that name meant.