The Etymology of Moron
Moron is one of the few English words whose pejorative career is precisely datable. The American psychologist Henry H. Goddard introduced moron as a technical term at a 1910 meeting of the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded. He took it from Greek mōrón (μωρόν), the neuter of mōrós (dull, foolish, sluggish), and assigned it to one of the categories on his own classification of intellectual disability — what he defined as a mental age of 8 to 12, milder than the older categories of imbecile and idiot (themselves earlier clinical terms). Goddard's scheme spread quickly through American institutions and intelligence testing in the 1910s and 1920s but was discredited and abandoned by mid-century, partly because of its eugenic abuses. Once it dropped out of clinical use, moron persisted as a generic insult and is now considered offensive in any technical sense. The Greek mōrós is more visibly preserved in oxymoron (sharp-dull, a contradiction in terms) and the American sophomore (wise-fool, second-year student).