tolerate

The word tolerate traces to a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as tel-, meaning to lift, carry, or bear a weight. Latin built from it the verb tolerare, first attested in the comedies of Plautus around 200 BC, where a character endures a bad situation rather than escaping it. The Stoic philosophers made tolerare a moral term: to bear what cannot be changed is the beginning of wisdom. Cicero used it for physical endurance and for the weight of grief alike.

The verb spent nearly fifteen centuries as a Latin theological term before English called for it. Erasmus of Rotterdam, in letters and essays of 1516 and 1517, used tolerantia as his watchword for a gentler church policy toward dissenters. His phrasing circulated among scholars who read Latin across Europe. By the 1530s, English writers were spelling the verb 'tolerate' directly, without passing through an intermediate French form.

The word's greatest test came in 1689. John Locke published 'A Letter Concerning Toleration' that year, arguing that a state cannot compel religious belief without becoming tyrannical. The English Toleration Act of 1689 used the word in its title and gave Nonconformists the legal right to worship. From that year, 'tolerate' meant not merely to endure but to officially permit, a shift that changed every later use of the word.

John Stuart Mill, in 'On Liberty' (1859), put his finger on the word's structural weakness: to tolerate is to permit while reserving the right to object. The word gives access but not acceptance. That tension has not resolved in the century and a half since Mill wrote. 'Tolerate' now sits at the center of debates about pluralism, free speech, and how much discomfort a society is obligated to bear.