You Are Quoting Bentham

Elliott Thornley · 25 May 2026

You might have seen this poster hanging up in your English class:

It’s pretty amazing. Shakespeare really shaped the English language!

So did Jeremy Bentham. He’s best-known for inventing utilitarianism and the panopticon, but he also coined the words:

• Maximize

• Minimize

• International

• Percentage

• Pluralism

• Monetary

• Locating

• Marginalize

• Codify

• The prefix ‘self-’

• The prefix ‘post-’

• The prefix ‘infra-’

• Exhaustive

• Insurable

• Collaborator

• Alleviating

• Unaffordable

• Exclusionary

• Inexclusively

• Antagonising

• Deontology

• Disambiguation

• Eudemonic

• Evidentiary

• Characterizable

• Perusable

• Preferability

• Remediation

• Astuteness

• Uncalculating

• Uncoerced

• Unbridgeable

• Subvariety

You can find even more Bentham coinages at my source.

And as if all that weren’t enough, Bentham kind of invented jogging:

Bentham appears to have been a regular jogger—or, as he put it, ‘circumgyrater’. According to the journalist George Wheatley, who stayed with the eighty-one year-old Bentham in March 1831, before both breakfast and dinner Bentham would take ‘a few turns in the garden, which … he calls circumgyrating’, which Wheatley described as a ‘trotting or taking up a kind of trotting step’.

— Joanna Pruchniewska

So not only are you quoting Bentham, you might be mimicking him too.