What does it mean to say that a person is a liberal, or to say that a thing may be described with this word? The answer, as is so often the case with the English language, is “it depends.”
liberty
'Liberal' shares a root with 'liberty' and can mean anything from "generous" to "loose" to "broad-minded." Politically, it means "“a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change."
Liberal can be traced back to the Latin word liber (meaning “free”), which is also the root of liberty ("the quality or state of being free") and libertine ("one leading a dissolute life"). However, we did not simply take the word liber and make it into liberal; our modern term for the inhabitants of the leftish side of the political spectrum comes more recently from the Latin liberalis, which means “of or constituting liberal arts, of freedom, of a freedman.”
We still see a strong connection between our use of the word liberal and liber in the origins of liberal arts. In Latin, liber functioned as an adjective, to describe a person who was “free, independent,” and contrasted with the word servus (“slavish, servile”). The Romans had artes liberales (“liberal arts”) and artes serviles (“servile arts”); the former were geared toward freemen (consisting of such subjects as grammar, logic, and rhetoric), while the latter were more concerned with occupational skills.
We borrowed liberal arts from French in the 14th century, and sometime after this liberal began to be used in conjunction with other words (such as education, profession, and pastime). When paired with these other words liberal was serving to indic
