The word “vegan” was coined in November 1944 by Donald Watson, a British woodworker and conscientious objector, who formed it by taking the first three and last two letters of “vegetarian.” He saw it as the logical beginning and end of vegetarianism. But the philosophy behind the word, avoiding all animal products on ethical grounds, stretches back thousands of years before Watson ever picked up a pen.
Why Watson Needed a New Word
By the early 1940s, Watson and a small group of like-minded vegetarians in England had grown frustrated. They wanted to exclude not just meat but dairy and eggs from their diets, and they felt the broader vegetarian movement wasn’t interested in having that conversation. The Vegetarian Society, Britain’s main organization at the time, showed no appetite for drawing a harder line on animal products. Watson and others, including fellow activist Elsie Shrigley, began calling themselves “non-dairy vegetarians,” a label that was accurate but clunky and unlikely to catch on.
In November 1944, Watson called a meeting with five other non-dairy vegetarians to discuss their shared philosophy. Out of that small gathering came both the word “vegan” and the founding of The Vegan Society. Other names had been floated, including “dairyban” and “vitan,” but “vegan” won out for its simplicity and its symbolic link to the word it grew from.
From Six People to a Formal Society
The early months were informal. Watson published a newsletter called The Vegan News and began building a mailing list. By early 1945, a provisional committee of ten members had formed, including Elsie Shrigley and a couple named the Hendersons. They held meetings at the Attic Club in London. On April 8, 1945, the group officially renamed itself from the “Non-Dairy Produce Group” to the Vegan Society, giving the movement a permanent identity.
The definition of veganism also evolved. What started as a dietary stance, simply not eating animal products, gradually expanded into a broader ethical framework. By the late 1970s, the Vegan Society had formalized a definition that went well beyond food, encompassing opposition to using animals for clothing, entertainment, or any other purpose. That shift reflected what many early members had already believed privately: that the logic of avoiding animal harm didn’t stop at the dinner plate.
The Idea Is Much Older Than the Word
Watson gave the concept a name, but he didn’t invent it. Ethical objections to using animal products appear across cultures going back millennia. Some of the most striking examples come from Jainism, a religion that emerged in India in the sixth century BCE. Jain ethics center on a principle called ahimsa, meaning “not harming,” and the dietary rules that flow from it are remarkably detailed.
All observant Jains avoid meat, fish, and eggs. From the eleventh century onward, Jain texts added increasingly specific prohibitions: honey is forbidden because it belongs to the bees, not to humans. Fruits with many seeds, like figs and pomegranates, are avoided because each seed contains the potential for life. Root vegetables like potatoes and carrots are off-limits because pulling them from the ground kills organisms in the soil. Jains traditionally drink only boiled and filtered water to avoid swallowing microscopic creatures, and they don’t eat after sunset for the same reason. Even career choices are shaped by ahimsa: Jains are discouraged from farming (because tilling soil kills small life forms) and from trading in meat, honey, eggs, silk, or leather.
This level of commitment to avoiding animal harm predates Watson by roughly 2,500 years.
A Medieval Arab Poet Who Rejected All Animal Products
Another striking precursor is Al-Ma’arri, an Arab poet and philosopher who lived from 973 to 1057 CE. Blind from childhood, he became one of the most celebrated writers of the medieval Arabic world, and he refused all animal products on explicitly ethical grounds. His poetry spells it out with unusual clarity for the era: don’t eat what the water has given up (fish), don’t desire the flesh of slaughtered animals, don’t take milk that mothers intended for their young, don’t grieve birds by stealing their eggs, and spare the honey that bees gathered for themselves. “I washed my hands of all this,” he wrote, “and would that I had perceived my way ere my temples grew hoar.”
Al-Ma’arri wasn’t part of an organized movement. He was a lone intellectual making a moral argument that most of his contemporaries ignored. But his reasoning, that animals have their own purposes and humans have no right to override them, maps almost perfectly onto the ethical case modern vegans make today.
How “Vegan” Entered Everyday Language
For decades after 1944, “vegan” remained a niche term, familiar mostly to animal rights activists and health-food communities in the UK. The word didn’t appear in a standard English dictionary until 1962, when the Oxford English Dictionary added it. Growth was slow through the mid-twentieth century. The Vegan Society’s membership numbered in the hundreds, not thousands, and plant-based alternatives to dairy and meat were hard to find outside specialty shops.
The shift toward mainstream recognition came in waves. The animal rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s brought new attention to the ethical arguments Watson’s generation had made. Environmental concerns added another layer in the 1990s and 2000s, as research increasingly linked livestock farming to deforestation, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions. By the 2010s, “vegan” had become a household word, appearing on restaurant menus, product labels, and social media bios worldwide.
Watson himself lived to see much of this transformation. He died in 2005 at age 95, having followed a vegan diet for over sixty years. He reportedly remained active and clear-minded well into old age, a detail his supporters never tired of pointing out.
What the Word Actually Means Now
The simplest definition of vegan is someone who doesn’t consume or use animal products. In practice, the term covers a wide spectrum. Some people adopt a vegan diet purely for health reasons, with no particular concern for animal welfare. Others follow the broader ethical framework the Vegan Society outlined, avoiding leather, wool, silk, and products tested on animals. Still others are motivated primarily by environmental impact.
These different motivations sometimes create tension within vegan communities, but they all trace back to the same linguistic root: a word that Donald Watson assembled from the scraps of “vegetarian” during wartime England, building on an ethical tradition that humans have wrestled with for thousands of years.