atheist

Greek atheos combined the prefix a-, meaning without, and theos, meaning god, to produce a word for those who lived without the gods. The earliest surviving use appears in Plato's Laws, written around 360 BCE, where Plato treats atheism as a civic danger requiring legal punishment. Socrates had been condemned to death in 399 BCE on the related charge of asebeia, or impiety, which included denying the city's gods, making Athens the first state to prosecute what we now call disbelief.

The word traveled into Latin as atheus, where it acquired an unexpected irony. Roman authorities applied it to early Christians because they refused to sacrifice to the traditional gods of the state. Justin Martyr wrote around 155 CE openly acknowledging that Christians were called atheists, arguing that they were only atheists with respect to false gods, not to the true one.

The English word atheist appeared around 1571, borrowed from French athéiste, which derived from Latin atheus. In Elizabethan England, the accusation was among the most damaging a person could receive, implying moral corruption alongside unbelief. Christopher Marlowe was accused of atheism by Richard Baines in 1593, the year of Marlowe's death, and the accusation was intended to destroy his reputation rather than describe a considered philosophical position.

The 18th-century Enlightenment revalued the word decisively. Baron d'Holbach published his System of Nature in 1770, openly defending atheism as the rational conclusion of materialist philosophy, becoming the first major European philosopher to use the label proudly. By the 19th century, Charles Bradlaugh in Britain was openly claiming the word, and by the 20th century atheist had shed most of its criminal associations, though not all of its social ones.