Whig

pronunciation

How to pronounce Whig in British English: UK [wɪg] word uk audio image

How to pronounce Whig in American English: US [hwɪɡ,wɪɡ] word us audio image

Noun:

urged social reform in 19th century England
a supporter of the American Revolution
a member of the Whig Party in the United States in pre-Civil-War times

Word Origin

Whig: Whig: [17] Whig appears to be short for the now obsolete Scottish term whiggamaire. This presumably originally meant ‘horse-driver’ (it is assumed to have been formed from the Scottish verb whig ‘drive’, whose origins are not known, and maire, a Scottish form of mare ‘female horse’), but its earliest recorded application was to Presbyterian supporters in Scotland. It was later adopted as a name for those who opposed the succession of the Catholic James II, and by 1689 it had established itself as the title of one of the two main British political parties, opposed to the Tories.

Whig: British political party, 1657, in part perhaps a disparaging use of whigg "a country bumpkin" (1640s); but mainly a shortened form of Whiggamore (1649) "one of the adherents of the Presbyterian cause in western Scotland who marched on Edinburgh in 1648 to oppose Charles I." Perhaps originally "a horse drover," from dialectal verb whig "to urge forward" + mare. In 1689 the name was first used in reference to members of the British political party that opposed the Tories. American Revolution sense of "colonist who opposes Crown policies" is from 1768. Later it was applied to opponents of Andrew Jackson (as early as 1825), and taken as the name of a political party (1834) that merged into the Republican Party in 1854-56. [I]n the spring of 1834 Jackson's opponents adopted the name Whig, traditional term for critics of executive usurpations. James Watson Webb, editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, encouraged use of the name. [Henry] Clay gave it national currency in a speech on April 14, 1834, likening "the whigs of the present day" to those who had resisted George III, and by summer it was official. [Daniel Walker Howe, "What Hath God Wrought," 2007, p.390] Whig historian is recorded from 1924. Whig history is "the tendency in many historians ... to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present." [Herbert Butterfield, "The Whig Interpretation of History," 1931]

1. On two whig interpretations of relationships between science and christianity .

2. Many of the gentlemen leaders of the revolution subscribed to radical whig political thinking .

3. He also wrote a number of political pamphlets in favor of the whig party .

4. Served the remainder of taylor 's term . Sought the whig nomination in 1852 , but lost to winfield scott .

5. It 's the wired version of whig history : ever better , onward and upward , progress unstopped .