Millenarians

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A group of individuals who believe in and promote the imminent arrival of a transformative millennium or a major social change
2. Individuals, often within religious or ideological contexts, who expect a coming period of peace and justice as part of prophecy
3. Seekers of a future utopia, driven by convictions about the significant and irreversible improvements in human society expected to occur within a thousand years

Etymology: The plural "millenarians" refers to people, and it traces back to the Latin "mille," meaning "thousand," which also gave English "mile" (from "mille passus," a thousand paces). Late Latin combined "millenarius," a thousand-year unit, with the adjective-forming suffix "-an," producing the English adjective "millenarian" and, later, a noun for those who hold its beliefs. The belief itself is older than the word. Early Christian writers expected Christ to return and rule for a thousand years, a period drawn from the Book of Revelation, and that expectation is what the Latin root carries into English. The "-an" ending arrived through Old French, which had inherited the suffix from Latin, and English adopted it as the usual way to form adjectives and nouns of followers or adherents. The plural simply adds "-s" to the noun. Because the word names people who expect a transformed world, its root quietly preserves a number of years rather than any idea of progress.