The word liberal, like liberty, derives from the Latin liber ("free"). In religion and politics, to be liberal is to be tolerant or open-minded, to favour freedom over control. In other words, a liberal is someone who adheres to the ideology of liberalism.

In the United States, liberal is sometimes used as an antonym for Conservative or a synonym for left-wing. There, it primarily refers to the New Deal variant of liberalism, emphasizing the positive role of the state. In other countries, liberal may have quite an opposite meaning: for instance, in France a liberal is a right-wing or classical liberal proponent of free markets. Elsewhere a liberal is somewhere between these two positions, or can refer to both. Some would use liberal in the classical liberal meaning of the word, others would prefer the social liberal meaning of the word.

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