liberate

Origin

Learned borrowing from Latin līberātus (“freed, liberated; absolved, acquitted; released”); see English -ate (suffix forming verbs, and used as the ending of participial adjectives and obsolete past participles from Latin). Līberātus is the perfect passive participle of līberō (“to free, liberate; to absolve, acquit; to release”), from līber (“free, unrestricted”), + -ō (suffix forming regular first-conjugation verbs); and līberō is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁léwdʰeros (“free”), from *h₁lewdʰ- (“to grow; people”) + *-teros (contrastive or oppositional adjectival suffix) (*h₁léwdʰeros possibly originally meant ‘belonging to one’s own people’, excluding slaves who were captured from other groups of people, and thus later came to mean “free (not enslaved)”). Not related to deliberate.