A person who has very strong, often extreme, political or religious opinions, especially ones that most people think are unreasonable or dangerous.
Built from “extreme,” from Latin “extremus” meaning “outermost” or “most distant,” plus the suffix -ist, which often marks a person with a certain belief. It shifted from describing outer limits to describing people whose ideas are far from the middle ground.
The word isn’t about being passionate; it’s about being at the far edge of belief, far away from the middle. That’s why “extremist” is usually negative—it suggests someone has moved beyond normal disagreement into dangerous territory.
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