Other forms: liberated, liberating, liberates
To liberate is to set free from control or imprisonment. Liberate the city, liberated in 1945, liberate the prisoners.
It carries approval, which is why every army says it and none admits to occupying. In chemistry it has a neutral technical sense: a reaction liberates a gas. It is also jokey slang for taking something you had no right to.
1verbliberateTo set free from control or imprisonment.
“The soldiers liberated the prisoners from the camp at the end of the war.”
liberate is a freeing.
Latin liberare means to set free, from liber, free. Liberty and liberal come from the same root.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁lewdʰ-
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁léwdʰeros — free
Latin
līberātus — freed, liberated; absolved, acquitted; released
English, today
liberate
Built from
Latin līberātus (“freed, liberated; absolved, acquitted; released”); see -ate. Līberātus is the perfect passive participle of līberō (“to free, liberate; to absolve, acquit; to release”), from līber (“free, unrestricted”), + -ō; and līberō is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European h₁léwdʰeros (“free”), from h₁lewdʰ- (“to grow; people”) + -teros (h₁léwdʰeros possibly originally meant ‘belonging to one’s own people’, excluding slaves who were captured from other groups of people, and thus later came to mean “free (not enslaved)”). Not related to deliberate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA