The term can connote different meanings in various locales, but here in the U.S., it refers to an individual who favors strong government support and intervention on behalf of the "disadvantaged," but a laissez-faire stance with regards to issues of personal privacy. It can also refer to someone unconstrained by prevailing social mores and tastes.

I take it to mean a party that favours more freedoms. From the Latin word 'liber', meaning free, something liberal tends toward freedom. In UK there are three main parties - the Conservatives, who tend to want things to be unchanging (esp with regard to social standing), Labour, who have traditionally been supported by and have supported the poorer, disadvantaged working man, and Liberal (or Liberal Democrats), who have taken the middle ground. Over the last decade or so politics has changed so much, though, that the middle ground is quite far to the right, at odds with the rest of Europe who are more leftist. (I know, general comment). So I would see Liberal as being more for personal freedoms instead of state oversight or Big-Brother.

Today in the United States it is a confusing word, because it has changed meanings in just 40 years. John F. Kennedy and Lane Kirkland, the president were both liberal, but JFK's nearly first act was to lower taxes, and both of them were extremely strong and well-informed anticommunists. It would be difficult to say this of anyone in the liberal leadership today, because they are all leftists. A leftist can be defined, practically, as someone whose answer to virtually any question is "We need higher taxes and more government." The word is usually in opposition to conservative, which today means the philosophy that people can be expected and should be encouraged to do more for themselves, and that government should be as small as possible and tax policy should leave as much money in taxpayers' pockets as possible, instead of taking it out of one person's pocket and giving it to another (with about 75% remaining in Washington, of course).

The word in political usage has very different meanings in the UK and US. In the US, it is generally aligned with what in the UK would be called Socialist. A strong emphasis on protecting the individual from problems, at the price of having a lot of laws saying what you can and cannot do. Usually strong support for unions. Tend to be "Pro Choice" and "Anti Gun", and accept that higher taxe4s are necessary to pay for supporting the less well off. In the UK, the Liberals and their successors the Liberal Democrats have tended to be the "see both sides of the point" party in the middle of politics. Strongly in favour of free speech and free trade, but with an intermediate position between Conservatives on the right ans Socialists on the left. Recently, a large chunk (but not all) has moves sharply to the right, leaving the Liberal Democrats in a confusing position between the two wings of the Labour party.

By the word 'liberal', I think of it as descriptive of people who exercise their liberties under the state in which they live. Someone can be said to be 'liberal-minded' if they favour liberation of one kind or another.

Merriam-Webster offers this as one of the definitions: 2 a : marked by generosity : OPENHANDED <a liberal giver> b : given or provided in a generous and openhanded way <a liberal meal> I understand the ‘fullness’ of the word. I do not accept the connotation of the word were some have “taken ownership” of this word to use it in disparaging remarks as some politicians have in America. I Timothy 6:18 were Paul said, ” 17 Give orders to those who are rich in the present system of things not to be high-minded, and to rest their hope, not on uncertain riches, but on God, who furnishes us all things richly for our enjoyment; 18 to work at good, to be rich in fine works, to be liberal, ready to share, 19 safely treasuring up for themselves a fine foundation for the future, in order that they may get a firm hold on the real life”. I hope that I am liberal in the sense that God wants me to be.

It is a relative term and depends upon being defined by where the center is.

My understanding is that a liberal is someone who rushes headlong into the future and a conservative is someone who clings to the past. I don't like either of them.

In deference to the previous political and erudite answers above, I'd suggest that a "liberal" is someone who wants more than he has or wants to share what you have with others. While a conservative, simply wants to let each exist to the best of their means, without interference. This is a good dynamic for a governing body who must consistently decide how a country's wealth is to be utilized. Very complementary. An economic yin-yang. RE: all social issues, the concept is meaningless, since both types pander for votes regardless of their philosophies.

Well, Sakhalinskii, good buddy, I can't help it if the rich guy went to my church, and my wife couldn't help it if the man who hired her was a Jewish investor. Outside of work & church, we didn't associate, so that's not really social climbing. But anecdotes aren't nearly as important as hard research, and the new book Who Really Cares? by Arthur C. Brooks is based on some very hard research: http://www.arthurbrooks.net/ and demonstrates that although the core of the Republican party--married churchgoers with children--has significantly less disposable income than our leftists, they are significantly more generous in every way. They give more to charity on top of supporting their churches, they give more time and even donate more blood. Where I differ with the left is that the left proposes solutions that sound good, such as our War on Poverty which spent six trillion dollars helping the poor and chiefly succeeded in destroying the black family and making blacks into our criminal class. (Before Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, blacks hat lower crime rates than whites and our criminal classes were Irish and Italian.) On the right, we propose solutions that actually work, such as helping people out of dependency and into the work force. They start out with poor jobs, but almost nobody stays there. And--incidentally--these poor working people don't just support themselves, they are also generous to worthy causes and people even needier than themselves. I have a colleague with eighteen children (still married to his first wife, too.) I asked him how he managed it financially. He said "Poor folks have lots of ways of helping each other out that don't involve cash." And which, I would add, usually don't involve government programs. In my country at least the main result of them has been to make fathers unnecessary, and the result of millions of households without committed men in them has been social chaos in our cities and one out of 32 adults under public supervision (in jail, on bail or on probation.) Our solutions don't "sound" as compassionate as leftist solutions, but they work.