Pacifist

How to spell pacifist

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pacifist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pacifist mean?

1. nounA person who believes that war and violence are unjustifiable and refuses to take part in them.
2. adjectiveRelating to or holding the belief that war and violence are unjustifiable.

Pacifist in a sentence

• noun

  As a committed pacifist, he refused to serve in any combat role.

• adjective

  The church took a firmly pacifist stance during the conflict.

• noun

  The famous pacifist spent decades campaigning against nuclear weapons.

• adjective

  Their pacifist convictions led them to protest outside the arms factory.

Where does pacifist come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin pax, pacis, meaning 'peace', combined with facere, 'to make', which together gave the Latin pacificus, literally 'peace-making'. From this came the French noun pacifiste, coined in the early twentieth century to describe someone opposed to war, and English borrowed it around 1900 as the movement against armed conflict gained momentum before the First World War. The same pax root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'pacific' (calm or peaceable), the Pacific Ocean (named by Magellan for its apparent calm), and 'pacify' (to soothe). The single c and single f are the spelling trap: the word looks as though it might double a letter, but it keeps both consonants single, mirroring the tidy Latin building blocks pac plus fic. Knowing it means 'one who makes peace' helps fix that quiet, undoubled shape in memory.

How the word is built

• pac- (from Latin pax, pacis: peace)
• -ific (from facere: to make)
• -ist (one who follows a belief)