liberation
Pluralliberations (some meanings)
- 1The act of liberating someone or something, or the state of having been freed.
Like a long-bolted door finally swinging open.
The liberation of the camp came in the final weeks of the war.
Her liberation from a job she hated gave her new energy.
Similarrelease, freedom, emancipation, deliverance, rescue
Oppositecaptivity, enslavement, imprisonment, subjugation
Note
The root meaning sits right on the surface. Latin liberatio, "a freeing," comes from liberare, "to set free," and reached English partly through Middle French libération, so the word is simply liberate plus -ion. What gets freed usually follows of, as in the liberation of slaves. It stretches easily from politics to the spirit, as in the soul's liberation at death.
- 2The achievement of equal rights and status, seen as freedom from long-standing and structural oppression.
Like removing a low ceiling that had stopped one group from ever rising.
The liberation of marginalized communities requires dismantling deep structural barriers.
Feminist thinkers often tie liberation to economic as well as legal equality.
Similaremancipation, freedom, equality, enfranchisement
Oppositeoppression, subjugation, repression
Note
A political word that usually travels with the name of a group in front of it: women's liberation, black liberation, gay liberation. The freedom in question is from entrenched structures, not from a jailer or an occupying army. That is what separates it from the plain act of freeing: no single oppressor is named, only a long-standing order to be undone.
Women's liberation became a rallying cry for a generation.
The march was organized by a gay liberation group.
- 3An ironic name for conquest or theft, presenting the seizure of something as though it were a noble act of freeing.
Like a fox describing its henhouse raid as setting the chickens free.
The troops' so-called liberation of the village left every shop emptied of goods.
Calling the raid a liberation fooled no one about who walked away richer.
Note
Irony does the work in this use. The noble word for freeing is borrowed to dress up taking, whether a territory is seized or goods are carried off. It usually signals itself with scare quotes or so-called, and the context has to make the joke plain. Said straight, it reads as the ordinary sense of freeing and can sound like an endorsement of the seizure.
Practice
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Origin
This word was borrowed from Middle French libération and from Latin liberatio ("a freeing"), which comes from liberare, past participle liberatus ("to set free"). It is equivalent to liberate plus the suffix -ion.