Luddite

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 10, 2026 is: Luddite • LUH-dyte  • noun Luddite refers to someone who is opposed to change, and especially to technological change. // My friends call me a Luddite for refusing to use chat bots. See the entry > Examples: “Today, a Luddite is your grandparent who keeps looking at the screen rather than the camera when on Zoom, the Boomer who types in all-capital letters, the grouchy man who refuses to get a smart phone, the professor spewing invective against Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. … But the Luddites weren’t simple-minded primitives who objected to technology out of ignorance; they were dedicated craftsmen in the looming guilds who despised the shoddy craftsmanship of the mechanized contraptions replacing them, and of those same machines robbing them of their livelihoods.” — Ed Simon, Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling, 2026 Did you know? Long before your Luddite friend was waxing poetic about how blissful it is to not have a smartphone, Luddites were protesting the textile machinery that was gradually replacing them. It was toward the end of 1811, in the vicinity of Nottingham, England, when handicraftsmen formed organized bands and began to riot for the destruction of the new machinery. Their name is of uncertain origin, but it may be connected to a (probably mythical) person named Ned Ludd. According to an unsubstantiated account in George Pellew's Life of Lord Sidmouth (1847), Ned Ludd was a Leicestershire villager of the late 1700s who, in a fit of rage, rushed into a stocking weaver's house and destroyed his equipment; subsequently, Ludd's name was proverbially connected with machinery destruction. With the onset of the information age, Luddite gained a broader sense describing anyone who shuns new technology.