Hypocrite - Theatre Etymology - Part 53

Most people know that if they call somebody a hypocrite, that means they think that the person is pretending to be one way or pretends that he or she does something when the opposite is true. A person may go out and act like he or she gives tons of money to charitable causes when really, all the person does is try to get even the poorest people to spend money on whatever he or she is selling. Maybe a person goes out in public and says or at least acts like he or she never uses bad language, but at home that person constantly uses swear words.

A quick overview of the etymology of the word hypocrite tells us that it comes from the Middle English word ipocrite which comes from the Old French which comes from the Late Latin word hypocrita which comes from the Greek word hypokritḗs (ὑποκριτής in the original Greek) meaning a stage actor, pretender, or dissembler.

The short etymology tells us that the word comes from the theatre being that it could mean a stage actor. However, there is more to the word. The word hypocrite is actually a compound word when coming from the Greek. It is made up of the Greek words hypo and krisis. Hypo means under and krisis means to distinguish, to judge, or to interpret. This makes the word hypocrite mean somebody who interprets from under.

This may sound strange at first, but it isn't. In Greek theatre, the actors would wear huge masks. Each mask was different so audiences could tell the characters apart. Because actors wore these masks, they were known to interpret the story of the play from under the masks.

The word eventually moved into vocabulary meaning any person who pretended to be something they were not. It was often used in religious texts to refer to people who pretended to be pious or morally good, but were not. At this time, it was often spelled ypocrite. The form of the word as hypocrite seems to have come about sometime in the 1500s.

In the early 1700s, hypocrite started to mean a person who acts in opposite ways to what he or she states about his or her beliefs or feelings. As far as language goes, this seems to be a surprisingly long time.

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