vegan

Donald Watson was a 34-year-old woodwork teacher in Leicester, England, when he sat down in November 1944 to name a new way of living. He wanted a word that distinguished people who avoided all animal products, including dairy and eggs, from ordinary vegetarians. His first candidate was dairyban. He also tried vitan and benevore. He settled on vegan, taking the first three and last two letters of vegetarian.

Watson wrote the word into the first newsletter of the Vegan Society, which he co-founded with his wife Dorothy Morgan. The newsletter had 25 subscribers. He gave the word a definition that November: the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals. Watson lived to 95, dying in 2005, long enough to see the word enter most major dictionaries and become a mainstream consumer category.

Vegan entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1962. For most of the following two decades it remained niche, associated with health reformers and animal rights activists. The word crossed into wider use in Britain during the 1980s, carried partly by the growth of the punk and straight-edge music scenes. American usage accelerated in the 1990s when chefs and food writers began labeling restaurant dishes.

The Economist declared 2019 the year of the vegan, citing record growth in plant-based food sales across Europe and North America. Google searches for vegan recipes grew more than 300 percent between 2010 and 2020. The word's brevity helped: it fitted neatly onto menus, packaging, and certification labels where vegetarian felt cumbersome. Watson's clipping, assembled in a Leicester kitchen during wartime rationing, had become a global commercial category.