Suffrage

suffrage

Suffrage is the right to vote in political elections.

I personally like this English term because although it has a simple and clear meaning, “the right to vote”, it is not self-explanatory at all as to why it looks the way it does. In Japanese, for example, one of the corresponding words is 投票権, but it is just the combination of 投票 (vote) and 権(利) (right).

The etymology of this word is not clear, and some etymologists seem to have different hypotheses. One of the most plausible explanations is that it comes from the prefix “sub-“ (meaning “under”) and the Latin word “fragor”. The word fragor means “a breaking (literally or figuratively) or an uproar”. (By the way, the words such as “fragile” and “fracture” have this origin.)

Based on this theory, suffrage can be thought of as “the act of trying to break the political status quo under the authority of the government” or something similar. This makes perfect sense to me.