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1 Definition
A person who dislikes or distrusts humankind in general and tends to avoid the company of others.
2 In Use
After years of disappointing colleagues, he retreated into a quiet, misanthrope's routine of solo hikes and unanswered emails.
3 Word Origin
misos Gk. · hatred → anthropos Gk. · human being → misanthrope 17th c. English
Misanthrope traces back to the Greek misos, meaning hatred, joined with anthropos, meaning human being. Greek writers used misanthropos to describe a hater of mankind long before the word entered English. It arrived in English in the seventeenth century largely through French and philosophical writing, carrying the same blunt sense of someone fed up with people as a whole rather than any single individual.
💡Fun Fact
The word gained enormous popular traction thanks to Moliere's 1666 play Le Misanthrope, whose protagonist Alceste refuses to flatter anyone and pays socially for his brutal honesty. The play turned the misanthrope into a recognizable comic and tragic type across European literature, someone whose disdain for society's hypocrisy is both principled and self defeating. Modern pop psychology sometimes distinguishes misanthropy from simple introversion, noting that a misanthrope's aversion is rooted in judgment of human behavior rather than a preference for quiet. The word also has a lesser known cousin, philanthrope, built from the opposite Greek root philos, meaning love, though English speakers favor philanthropist instead.