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The noun flat-earther designates a person who believes that the planet Earth is flat.
This noun—as well as its earlier synonym flat-earth man—first appeared in the late 19th century. The following explanations are from Lord chief justice and the flat earth libel, by Michael Cross, published in The Law Society Gazette on Thursday 9th January 2025:
Contrary to popular myth, belief in a flat earth is a modern phenomenon. Certainly Columbus never feared sailing over any edge: in 1492, astronomers and mariners had known for a millennium that the earth must be spherical. The third century BCE scholar Eratosthenes even had a reasonably accurate stab at measuring its circumference. Globism [?] survived the so-called ‘dark ages’; few scholars found any incompatability [sic] between a spherical earth (albeit at the centre of the Universe) and Biblical ‘truth’.
It took the eminently practical Victorians to revive flat earthism. This wasn’t so much a revolt against a technological age as a consequence of it. At a time when knowledge paradigms (though the phrase was not yet in use) were being overturned left, right and centre, the opportunity was ripe for enterprising autodidacts to make names for themselves through the new social media of the penny post, cheap periodicals and self-improvement societies.
The earliest occurrences that I have found of the noun flat-earth man are as follows, in chronological order:
1-: From Legal and Police News, published in The Graphic (London, England) of Saturday 21st December 1872 [page 591, column 2]—the reference is to John Hampden (1819-1891), who libelled the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913):
Mr. Hampden, the “flat-earth” man, has again been libelling Mr. Wallace, and has been ordered to publish a fresh apology every week until next session.
2-: From a letter by ‘W. C. E.’, published in The English Mechanic and World of Science (London, England) of Friday 3rd December 1875 [page 299, column 1]:
The hypothesis of the ascent of man from the lower animals is, no doubt, extremely offensive to our pride of race. So that a great amount of allowance can be made for the opponents of the evolution theory which cannot for the “flat-earth men.”
3-: From a correspondence from London, published in The York Herald (York, Yorkshire, England) of Saturday 2nd September 1876 [page 5, column 3]:
Mr. John Hampden retains all his notions and his eccentricities. He denies there is a North Pole to find, or to reach. It does not exist. He says that no ship’s crew will ever find it, or know it when they are near it. “And the Alert and Discovery will learn no more of the North Pole than the Challenger has learnt of the South Pole. If they do, I will never put a hat on my head or shoes on my feet again as long as I live.” I could wish to see this flat-earth man in the guise he mentions. But perhaps like the ’cute pilgrims who boil their peas, he would keep indoors for the remainder of his life—and wear slippers.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the noun flat-earther that I have found:
1-: From the Buffalo Courier (Buffalo, New York, USA) of Monday 10th February 1896 [page 3, column 2]:
Eugene L. Smith of this place is a convert to the flat earth theory. In his opinion the assertion that the earth is an enormous round ball, whirling through space, is all rot and he backs up his views with almost convincing arguments. Smith is not a fool by any means, and at one time was as firm a believer in the globular world as he is now in the pancake world. His conversion occurred about five years ago while residing in Byron and he has studied the subject until he understands it thoroughly. He claims that the advocates of the new theory have never been downed in debate, but have on the contrary succeeded in giving their opponents many a nut which they were powerless to crack, the explanation of which was simple for the flat earthers.
2-: From People who still believe that the earth is flat. Some striking arguments in favour of the theory, published in Pearson’s Weekly (London, England) of Saturday 2nd July 1898 [page 822, columns 1 & 2]:
The gentleman I recently interviewed in the interests of P.W., gravely assures me that the people who believe the world to be a flat plane, have increased so enormously of late years, that it is proposed to form a society, and found a journal having for its object the destruction of what he calls “the abominable system of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, based on theories opposed to facts and common sense.”
[…]
When I asked the professor of the old new school on what the earth reposed, he replied, with the greatest confidence, “On an ocean.”
“Yes, but what supports the ocean?”
“Nothing,” was the reply. “It is unfathomable.”
When I had recovered from the shock of this announcement, I inquired as to the whereabouts of the South Pole.
“There never was, and never will be a South Pole,” was the reply.
[…]
On hearing this, P.W., not being used to the logic of the flat-earthers, collapsed.
[…]
Finally, the flats—I mean the flat-earthers—declare that no revolving body was ever constructed or intended for habitation.
3-: From the Supplement to the Northern Weekly Gazette (Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, England) of Saturday 29th October 1898 [page III, column 3]:
SOMETHING GONE WRONG WITH THE EARTH.
Flat-earthers have had their day. Now comes a still more startling but far more probable theory—that is, that the world we live in is, in shape, no longer what we have always considered it—a spheroid flattened at the poles like an orange—but is something rather resembling a gigantic spinning-top, with the North Pole on the top and the South Pole the point on which the top revolves. Everyone knows that a heated body contracts as it cools; that is a law of nature. Now the earth has been slowly cooling for millions of years, and the crinkles of its cooling are the great mountain ranges which you will notice, on looking at a globe, all run from north to south. Contracting as it does, and constantly spinning, it is odd, if the shape remains orange-like, that all the land should be around the North Pole, and all the continents have the curiously triangular shape they have at their southern extremities. At least, that is the theory put forward by certain folks of a scientific turn of mind—“cranks,” did you say?—in the United States.—E. Tennant, 119, Grange-road East, Middlesbrough.
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