Abolition is the formal ending of something — not pausing it, not reforming it, but striking it off the books for good. The abolition of the death penalty. The abolition of school fees. The abolition of a tax nobody could defend any more.
One use of the word outweighs all the others: the abolition of slavery, the long campaign through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the abolitionists who gave their lives to it. Say abolition on its own and that is usually what people hear. But the word belongs to anything an authority formally ends, and it stays a formal word — you abolish a law, a tax, a monarchy, a punishment. You do not abolish your gym membership. It nearly always takes of: the abolition of something.
1nounrepealThe formal ending of a law, a custom, or an institution.~48%
“The abolition of the death penalty was debated for decades.”
synonyms: repeal, scrapping
2nounabolitionThe ending of slavery in particular — the sense the word carries on its own.~52%
“Abolition reached the British Empire in 1833.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 23 sentences found in the wild and placed 23 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
abolition is a formal act of law.
a-BOL-ition → a BALL
A heavy iron ball swings through the court and hits nothing but a giant open law book. The pages fly up like paper snow. The building is fine. The law is gone.
hooks ontoball
The Latin behind it is aboleō, to check the growth of a thing — built on an ancient root, *h₂el-, that means grow. To abolish was never to smash something; it was to stop it growing and let it wither. Its Latin twin abolēscō says so outright: to wither, to vanish, to cease.
Latin
abolitiō
Old French
abolucion
Middle French
abolition
English, today
abolition
Borrowed from Middle French abolition, from Old French abolucion, from Latin abolitiō. Equivalent to abolish + -tion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA