The Etymology of Lynch
Lynch is one of the relatively few English verbs derived from a person’s name. The phrase Lynch law is recorded in American English from 1811 and the verb lynch from 1835, both referring to extrajudicial summary punishment by a community or mob, often by hanging. The name almost certainly comes from Charles Lynch (1736–1796), a Virginia planter and justice of the peace who, during the American Revolution, presided over an irregular wartime court that imprisoned and otherwise punished suspected British Loyalists without formal trial. (A rival theory points to William Lynch of Pittsylvania County, but Charles Lynch fits the date and place better.) In its original American context, lynching was not always racially specific and not always lethal. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, lynching in the U.S. had become overwhelmingly associated with the racially motivated mob murder of African Americans, and the word now carries that historical weight.