The Word Vegan Was Built Like a Secret Code

Long before plant-based menus filled every city block, a small group in England sat around debating what to even call themselves. Vegetarians who avoided dairy and eggs felt like they needed their own identity, separate from the broader movement they'd grown out of.

In 1944, a woodworker named Donald Watson founded a tiny breakaway club with just a handful of members meeting in Leicester, England. They needed a name that captured something the word "vegetarian" couldn't quite express on its own.

Watson and his fellow founders tossed around options like "dairyban" and "vegetarian" and "benevore" before landing on something cleverer. The word "vegan" wasn't borrowed from Latin or Greek roots at all, it was engineered from scratch.

They literally took the first three letters and the last two letters of "vegetarian" and mashed them together to form "vegan." Watson explained it as marking the beginning and end of vegetarianism itself, since he saw the diet as the natural conclusion of that older philosophy.

The tiny group calling itself The Vegan Society had only a few dozen members in its earliest years, printing newsletters by hand and mailing them out to a small circle of believers. Nobody in that room could have guessed the word would eventually appear on menus in nearly every country on Earth.

By 2019, dictionary editors at Merriam-Webster and Oxford were tracking "vegan" as one of the fastest-growing words in the English language, decades after it started as an invented shorthand for a handful of Brits in a meeting hall.

Watson lived to be 95 years old, long enough to watch his makeshift word turn into a global label slapped on everything from leather jackets to ice cream cartons. He never trademarked it, never profited from it, he just needed a name for a potluck dinner club that changed how the world eats.