Origins
The word 'prejudice' entered English in the thirteenth century from Old French 'prejudice,' from Latin 'praeiūdicium,' meaning 'prior judgment' or 'judicial precedent.' The Latin compound consists of 'prae-' (before) and 'iūdicium' (judgment, trial), which itself derives from 'iūdex' (judge), a compound of 'iūs' (law, right) and the root of 'dicere' (to say, to declare). The word's etymology reveals its original neutrality: a 'prejudice' was simply a judgment made before the main trial — what we would call a 'preliminary ruling' or 'precedent.'
In Roman law, 'praeiūdicium' was a technical term for a preliminary legal action that could influence subsequent proceedings. A 'praeiūdicium' might determine a point of fact or law that would then be binding in a later, fuller trial. There was nothing inherently negative about the concept — it was simply a feature of legal procedure. The negative connotation developed gradually in Late Latin and Old French, where 'prejudging' came to imply unfairness: to judge before hearing the evidence is to deny justice.
When the word entered English, it carried two distinct senses that have coexisted ever since. The first is 'harm, injury, detriment' — the consequence of an unfair prejudgment. This is the sense preserved in the legal phrase 'without prejudice,' which means 'without harm to any existing right or claim.' A case dismissed 'without prejudice' can be refiled; one dismissed 'with prejudice' cannot. The second sense is 'a preconceived opinion not based on reason or experience' — the mental state of prejudging.
Development
The social and moral sense of 'prejudice' — bias against a group based on race, religion, ethnicity, or other characteristics — became the word's dominant meaning in the modern period. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and evidence, sharpened the critique of prejudice as an intellectual and moral failure. Voltaire, Hume, and Kant all wrote extensively about prejudice, though not always consistently — Kant, for instance, denounced prejudice in principle while expressing racial prejudices in practice.
Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' (1813) gave the word one of its most famous literary contexts. In the novel, Elizabeth Bennet's prejudice against Darcy and Darcy's pride operate as complementary moral failings that must be overcome for love to prevail. Austen's title pairs the two vices with epigrammatic precision, and the novel explores how both stem from hasty judgment — from conclusions reached before adequate evidence is gathered.
In the twentieth century, the study of prejudice became a major field within social psychology. Gordon Allport's 'The Nature of Prejudice' (1954) remains a foundational text, defining prejudice as 'an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization.' Allport's 'contact hypothesis' — the idea that intergroup contact under certain conditions reduces prejudice — has been extensively tested and largely confirmed, influencing policies from school desegregation to military integration.