WORD OF DAY: LIBERTINE
noun|LIB-er-teen
What It Means
A libertine is in broad terms a person who is unrestrained by convention or morality. More narrowly, the word describes someone who leads an immoral life.
// The legend of Don Juan depicts him as a playboy and libertine.
Examples of LIBERTINE
“As horrifying as some of the sins of Victorian scholarship may have been, it would have been anathema to these students of classical philosophy to simply throw out Plato. But that’s what some of their modern inheritors have tried to do. … It’s worth noting that we might not have Plato’s work at all, were it not carefully studied and preserved by the Islamic scholars (hardly libertines themselves) of the medieval period.” — R. Bruce Anderson, The Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), 1 Feb. 2026
Did You Know?
“I only ask to be free,” says Mr. Skimpole in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. His words would undoubtedly have appealed to the world’s first libertines. The word libertine comes from the Latin lībertīnus, a word used in early writings of Roman antiquity to describe a formerly enslaved person who had been set free (the Roman term for an emancipated person was the Latin lībertus). Middle English speakers used libertine to refer to a freedman, but by the late 1500s its meaning was extended to freethinkers, both religious and secular, and it later came to imply that an individual was a little too unrestrained, especially in moral affairs. The likely Latin root of libertine is līber, the ultimate source of our word liberty.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
