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Manifesto Has Latin Roots
Manifesto is related to manifest, which occurs in English as a noun, verb, and adjective. Of these, the adjective, which means "readily perceived by the senses," is oldest, dating to the 14th century. Both manifest and manifesto derive ultimately from the Latin noun manus ("hand") and -festus, a combining form of uncertain meaning that is also found in the Latin adjective infestus ("hostile"), an ancestor of the English infest. Something that is manifest is easy to perceive or recognize, and a manifesto is a statement in which someone makes his or her intentions or views easy for people to ascertain. Perhaps the most well-known statement of this sort is the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to outline the platform of the Communist League.
Examples of manifesto in a Sentence
Jesse Whittock, Deadline, 16 Apr. 2026
But the manifesto provides a clear insight into the thinking of a party that was once considered fringe, but now poses a threat to the political establishment.
—Sebastian Shukla, CNN Money, 15 Apr. 2026
There are sequences of teenage Emma practicing shooting her gun outside, walking around her house with a rifle and filming a suicide manifesto.
—Patrick Ryan, USA Today, 2 Apr. 2026
Turner could not have known that his manifesto would define scholarly and popular understandings of American and western history for the next one hundred years.
—Literary Hub, 1 Apr. 2026
AfD has long called for foreign soldiers to leave Germany, and the party's manifesto demands the withdrawal of all nuclear weapons from German soil.
—Ellie Cook, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 Mar. 2026
The sting of the London convention inspired her, almost a decade later, to write a manifesto modelled after the Declaration of Independence, which was her opening salvo in a long fight for women’s suffrage.
—Moira Donegan, New Yorker, 13 Mar. 2026
More than a year before his recent standoff with the Pentagon, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, published a 15,000-word manifesto describing a glorious AI future.
—Ross Andersen, The Atlantic, 11 Mar. 2026
Inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Hezbollah came into existence in 1985 with the publication of a manifesto that detailed its aims for the region.
—Mireille Rebeiz, The Conversation, 4 Mar. 2026
Cite this Entry
“Manifesto.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifesto. Accessed 17 Apr. 2026.
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