/ˈprɛdʒ.ʊ.dɪs/
[noun] An unfair opinion or feeling about a person or group, formed without knowing enough about them or without thinking carefully. It can also mean harm or disadvantage caused to someone.
Prejudice literally means 'judging before' — the word itself confesses the very mistake it describes.
The story of 'prejudice' begins in ancient Rome, with two Latin words joined together: 'prae', meaning 'before', and 'judicium', meaning 'judgement' or 'decision'. The compound 'praejudicium' was a legal term, used to describe a preliminary ruling — a decision made in an earlier case that would influence or set a precedent for cases that followed. There was nothing inherently negative about it. It simply meant that something had been decided ahead of time, before the full evidence was in.
From Latin 'praejudicium', the word passed into Old French as 'prejudice', keeping its legal flavour but slowly broadening outward from the courtroom. Old French carried it into Middle English during the 13th century, where English speakers first wrote it as 'prejudice' — a shape it has barely changed since. In its earliest English appearances, the word still carried a double meaning: it could mean a prior legal judgement, but it also began to mean something closer to 'harm' or 'damage to one's rights'. You can still hear this second sense in the legal phrase 'without prejudice', meaning that what is said cannot be used to damage someone's legal position later.
The psychological sense we know best today — a negative opinion formed without fair reasoning — developed gradually through the 14th and 15th centuries. As the word drifted away from courtrooms and into everyday conversation, people began using it to describe the very human habit of making up one's mind before looking at the facts. The word quietly evolved from describing a formal legal pre-judgement to describing an informal mental one. The shift is subtle but powerful: law became psychology, procedure became attitude.
The root 'judicium' is one of Latin's most productive seeds. It gave English a whole family of words through different routes. Latin 'judex' (a judge) became Old French 'juge', which entered Middle English as 'judge'. Latin 'judicare' (to judge) became Old French 'jugier', then Middle English 'jugen', giving us the verb 'to judge'. The same root also produced 'judicial', 'judiciary', and 'judicious' directly from Latin through learned borrowings in the 15th and 16th centuries. Even the word 'jury' traces back here, via Old French 'juree' from Latin 'jurata', meaning 'sworn judgement'.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about 'prejudice' is that its form is perfectly honest about its own fault. The prefix 'pre-' announces the problem right there in the word: this is judgement that comes too early, before the evidence, before the meeting, before the conversation. Philosophers and writers have always noticed this transparency. Jane Austen played with it famously — her novel 'Pride and Prejudice' sets two kinds of flawed thinking against each other, and the word 'prejudice' in her title carries all the weight of its Latin meaning: a mind that has already decided before it has truly seen.
Today, 'prejudice' sits at the centre of conversations about fairness, race, gender, and human rights. Its meaning has grown more specific and more serious with time. But the word itself remains a small philosophical puzzle: a noun that, in its very construction, explains exactly what is wrong with the thing it names. To carry a prejudice is, quite literally, to carry a pre-judgement — a verdict delivered before the trial has even begun.