The Word Invented in One Evening

Very few words in the English language come with a birth certificate and a known author. "Vegan" is one of them. It's not even a hundred years old, and we know exactly who coined it.

Donald Watson was born on the second of September, nineteen ten, in Mexborough, a Yorkshire town of coal mines and farms. As a boy, he'd visit his uncle George's farm — and one day he watched a pig being slaughtered. He later said that until that moment, the farm had felt like an almost idyllic place. Afterward, it never did again. In nineteen twenty-four, at fourteen, he made himself a New Year's resolution: no more meat. And here's the thing — he kept it, for the next eighty years.

Watson spent his working life as a woodwork teacher, training boys in Leicester and later in Keswick, twenty-three years in all. No stages, no rallies, no political party behind him. When the war came, he registered as a conscientious objector — someone who, on principle, wouldn't take up arms.

By the early nineteen forties, Watson had arrived at an idea that struck even fellow vegetarians as extreme: if giving up meat was about how animals were treated, then milk and eggs couldn't logically be exempted. He took the idea to the Vegetarian Society in London, asking them to give people like him a place and a voice. They turned him down — too radical a stance.

So in November nineteen forty-four, six people met in Leicester: Watson himself, his future wife Dorothy, Elsie Shrigley, and a couple named Henderson. They needed a name, and they didn't reach for anything grand. Watson's own explanation: take the English word "vegetarian," keep the first three letters and the last two — the beginning and the end. What's left is a short word that carries the whole idea inside it, because, as he put it, this all begins with vegetarianism and ends with it too.

That same month, the first issue of their newsletter came out — twelve pages, hand-printed. Watson did nearly all of it himself: writing, copying, answering letters. For two years, that was the operation. No organization behind it, no funding — just a schoolteacher who believed the work was worth doing, even when everyone around him thought it odd.

Time did the rest. In nineteen ninety-four, on the fiftieth anniversary of that November evening, World Vegan Day was born — the first of November, a date chosen deliberately by the Society's then-president, Louise Wallis: late October into early November is, in many cultures around the world, a season of harvest, remembrance, and shared meals.

Watson himself lived to ninety-five, dying on the sixteenth of November, two thousand five, in Keswick, in Cumbria. By then, the word he'd invented at a table with five friends was sitting in the dictionaries of every major language on earth — Russian included. Judging by his interviews, that still caught him a little by surprise, right to the end.

If you leave with more questions than you came with, that was the idea. The answers and the map live at moygid dot online.