proactive
The origin and history of proactive.
Etymology
Coined in 1933 by psychologists Paul Whiteley and Gerald Blankfort, later popularized in the 1946 book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl, deliberately as the opposite of "reactive."
Class of 1933
proactive first entered the language around 1933. Other words from the same year:
See the full Class of 1933 →