Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 4, 2024 is:

meliorism • \MEE-lee-uh-riz-um\  • noun

Meliorism refers to the belief that the world tends to improve and that humans can aid its betterment.

// Her belief in meliorism has given her a positive outlook on life.

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Examples:

"'Encanto' has been praised for its cultural accuracy. And many Colombians and Colombian Americans loved the film—but it has also started a debate: What can and can't one movie capture about a country? … 'I found it charming,' the writer and editor Camilo Garzón said in an interview. 'I found it beautiful. At the same time, it fell short in terms of what representation for representation’s sake can be.' He explained, 'In the spirit of American meliorism, the criticism is to make things better, not necessarily because I didn’t like it.'" — Laura Zornosa, The New York Times, 11 Mar. 2022

Did you know?

In 1877, British novelist George Eliot believed she had coined meliorist when she wrote, "I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word 'meliorist' except myself." Her contemporaries credited her with coining both meliorist and meliorism, and one of her letters contains an early documented use of meliorism; however, there is evidence that meliorist had been around decades before she started using it. Whoever coined it did so by drawing on the Latin word melior, meaning "better." It is likely that the English coinages were also influenced by another melior descendant, meliorate, a synonym of ameliorate ("to make better or more tolerable") that was introduced to English in the 1500s.