The word 'discriminate' entered English in the seventeenth century from Latin 'discrīminātus,' the past participle of 'discrīmināre' (to divide, to separate, to distinguish). The Latin verb derives from 'discrīmen' (a separation, a distinction, an interval, a turning point), which in turn comes from 'discernere' (to separate by sifting), composed of 'dis-' (apart) and 'cernere' (to sift, to separate, to decide). The PIE root is *krey- (to sieve, to separate), a root whose descendants include some of the most important words in the vocabulary of judgment, distinction, and decision.
The original English sense of 'discriminate' was neutral and intellectual: to perceive distinctions, to differentiate between things. A 'discriminating palate' can tell one wine from another. A 'discriminating eye' notices fine differences. 'Discrimination' in its original sense meant the faculty of making fine distinctions — a positive intellectual quality. This neutral sense persists in technical and aesthetic contexts.
The pejorative sense — to treat people differently based on prejudiced categories — developed in the nineteenth century and became dominant in the twentieth, especially after the American civil rights movement. 'Racial discrimination,' 'gender discrimination,' 'age discrimination,' 'employment discrimination' — the word became inseparable from injustice. This semantic shift was so powerful that the original neutral sense often requires qualification: one must say 'discriminating taste' to avoid the negative connotation that now adheres to the bare word.
The PIE root *krey- generated an enormous English word family through Latin and Greek. Through Latin 'cernere' (to sift): 'discern' (to separate by seeing — to perceive clearly), 'concern' (to sift together — to relate to, to worry about), 'certain' (separated, decided — hence sure), 'decree' (a thing decided), 'discreet' (able to separate — showing prudence in speech), 'discrete' (separated — individually distinct), and 'secret' (set apart, separated from knowledge). Through Latin 'crīmen' (a charge, an accusation — a thing decided): 'crime,' 'criminal,' and 'incriminate.'
Through Greek 'krínein' (to separate, to judge): 'crisis' (a separation, a turning point — the moment of decision), 'critic' (one who judges by separating good from bad), 'criterion' (a standard for judging), 'critique,' 'critical,' 'hypocrite' (one who judges under — who pretends to judge by standards they do not follow), 'diacritic' (a mark that separates — distinguishing similar letters), and 'endocrine' (secreting within).
The existence of both 'discreet' and 'discrete' in English — both from the same Latin word 'discrētus' (separated, past participle of 'discernere') but with different meanings — illustrates how a single etymology can fork into distinct words. 'Discreet' (prudent, circumspect) entered through Old French with a behavioral sense. 'Discrete' (individually separate and distinct) was borrowed later directly from Latin with a logical/mathematical sense. They are doublets: same
The word 'discriminate' thus stands at the intersection of cognition and ethics. Its root meaning — to sieve, to separate, to tell apart — describes one of the mind's most basic operations. The ethical question is not whether to discriminate (in the sense of distinguishing) but on what basis, and to what end.