Other forms: propagandist
Propaganda is information shaped to make you believe something, put out by people who want something from you. It need not be false; it just never tells you the other half.
The word is always hostile — nobody calls their own material propaganda — so it is a judgement, not a category. It is uncountable, which trips learners up: you say a piece of propaganda, never a propaganda. It attaches to states and wars most naturally, though people now use it of advertising and of anything one-sided enough to annoy them.
1nounpropagandaOne-sided information spread to make people believe or support something.~57%
“The posters were pure wartime propaganda.”
synonyms: disinformation, spin
2nounlogicThe organised spreading of such material.~43%
“The ministry ran propaganda for thirty years.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 181 sentences found in the wild and placed 168 of them on a sense (13 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
propa-GANDA → a GRAND parade
A grand parade of huge smiling posters. Every face is the same face, and every one says the same words.
hooks ontogrand
It began as church Latin, not politics: a committee of cardinals founded in 1622 to spread the faith, the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. Propaganda meant things to be propagated — spread, like a plant. The gardening sense is still there in propagate.
New Latin
prōpāganda
English, today
propaganda
Built from
From New Latin prōpāganda, from prōpāgandus. From New Latin prōpāganda, short for Congregātiō dē Prōpāgandā Fidē (“a committee of cardinals established in 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions”) literally “congregation for propagating the faith”, and properly the ablative feminine gerundive of Latin prōpāgō (“propagate”). Once the word had been detached from the phrase from which it originated, it could be reinterpreted as a neuter plural gerundive, meaning "things to be propagated"; compare agenda. Modern political sense dates from World War I, not originally pejorative.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA