"Power" in Language
*last updated on February 27, 2026
Language can confuse us, but it can also offer real insight—if we ask the right questions. I try not to treat language as a set of simple labels that different cultures paste onto the same reality. Languages carve up experience in different ways. They also preserve assumptions, values, and habits of attention: people coin words for what they want to notice, discuss, praise, fear, blame, or defend.
That’s one reason so many words resist clean translation. The moment you translate, you’re not just swapping labels—you’re trying to carry over a cluster of context, connotation, and “felt meaning.” The more complex the phenomenon, the harder it is to find an equivalent that does the same work in another language.
A small example: one Russian adjective, many English choices
While translating into English a poem I had written year ago in Russian, I ran into a single word that made the whole line wobble: зы́бкий (zybkiy, stress on the first syllable). Depending on context, English translations can include fragile, shaky, unsteady, unstable, loose, or wobbly. In literary translation you may also see delicate, faint, elusive, ambiguous, or untrustworthy.
There’s no single English adjective that covers that entire semantic range. We can’t always tell why a language ends up needing exactly this blend of fragility + instability + uncertainty—but the existence of such words suggests something simple and human: people want to talk about what (and whom) they can rely on, what feels solid, and what doesn’t. That observation still doesn’t solve the translator’s problem. It only clarifies why the problem exists.
Not every word is like that
Some words refer to things that are relatively concrete and widely observable across cultures--dog, table, and so on. In ordinary contexts they translate easily (“I walk my dog every morning”). This doesn’t mean they’re culturally neutral. Even “dog” can pick up strong secondary meanings (including insults) that vary by time and place.
Still, the basic point stands: language can sometimes hint at what is widely shared in human experience. Dogs, for example, are domesticated animals found around the world; their close relationship with humans is ancient, even if scholars debate the precise timeline of domestication.
And occasionally, when a word—or at least a concept cluster—shows up across many languages, it’s reasonable to suspect we’re looking at something species-level important. That doesn’t mean it is understood identically everywhere. Consider “love”: it has many meanings and nuances, and different languages divide it up differently; yet it appears across cultures and eras in recognizable forms. That alone suggests that love (in many shapes) matters deeply in human life.
So, what about “power”?
This project is about power. So I began with a linguistic curiosity: How do people talk about power across languages? If we find recurring threads, what might that tell us about the phenomena we group under the English word power?
This is not an exhaustive linguistic study, and it’s not an attempt to use language as a shortcut to an “ultimate” theory. Language also has power over us, and I don’t assume vocabulary can deliver final truths. What I do think it can do is supply clues—recurring themes that help us ask better questions.
That’s one reason so many words resist clean translation. The moment you translate, you’re not just swapping labels—you’re trying to carry over a cluster of context, connotation, and “felt meaning.” The more complex the phenomenon, the harder it is to find an equivalent that does the same work in another language.
A small example: one Russian adjective, many English choices
While translating into English a poem I had written year ago in Russian, I ran into a single word that made the whole line wobble: зы́бкий (zybkiy, stress on the first syllable). Depending on context, English translations can include fragile, shaky, unsteady, unstable, loose, or wobbly. In literary translation you may also see delicate, faint, elusive, ambiguous, or untrustworthy.
There’s no single English adjective that covers that entire semantic range. We can’t always tell why a language ends up needing exactly this blend of fragility + instability + uncertainty—but the existence of such words suggests something simple and human: people want to talk about what (and whom) they can rely on, what feels solid, and what doesn’t. That observation still doesn’t solve the translator’s problem. It only clarifies why the problem exists.
Not every word is like that
Some words refer to things that are relatively concrete and widely observable across cultures--dog, table, and so on. In ordinary contexts they translate easily (“I walk my dog every morning”). This doesn’t mean they’re culturally neutral. Even “dog” can pick up strong secondary meanings (including insults) that vary by time and place.
Still, the basic point stands: language can sometimes hint at what is widely shared in human experience. Dogs, for example, are domesticated animals found around the world; their close relationship with humans is ancient, even if scholars debate the precise timeline of domestication.
And occasionally, when a word—or at least a concept cluster—shows up across many languages, it’s reasonable to suspect we’re looking at something species-level important. That doesn’t mean it is understood identically everywhere. Consider “love”: it has many meanings and nuances, and different languages divide it up differently; yet it appears across cultures and eras in recognizable forms. That alone suggests that love (in many shapes) matters deeply in human life.
So, what about “power”?
This project is about power. So I began with a linguistic curiosity: How do people talk about power across languages? If we find recurring threads, what might that tell us about the phenomena we group under the English word power?
This is not an exhaustive linguistic study, and it’s not an attempt to use language as a shortcut to an “ultimate” theory. Language also has power over us, and I don’t assume vocabulary can deliver final truths. What I do think it can do is supply clues—recurring themes that help us ask better questions.
A quick note on language families (and why I’m limiting the scope)
Linguists group languages into families: languages in the same family share a reconstructed ancestor (a “proto-language”). Families can nest inside larger families. Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese belong to the Romance family; Romance languages are part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many languages native to Europe and parts of South Asia.
Indo-European includes very diverse languages—English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindustani among them. That does not mean modern forms look similar, but faint resemblances sometimes surface in surprising ways. One example I found personally striking: the Russian verb буди́ть (budít’, “to wake (someone) up”) is cognate with the Sanskrit root budh- (“to awaken / become aware”), which is also behind Buddha (“awakened”).
That said, dividing languages into families can be tricky. Modern languages also share words through borrowing, and borrowing is not the same as common descent. Estimates of how many language families exist vary widely, and I’m not trying to adjudicate that debate here.
So my goal is modest: I’ll look at “power” in English, Russian, Spanish, French, and German—languages I can all read and speak to some extent. Spanish and French are Romance; English and German are Germanic; Russian is Balto-Slavic. All of these are Indo-European, and (at a high level) can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European.
Clearly, this does not justify conclusions about “power” across all cultures and language families. But Indo-European languages do matter for my purposes for a practical reason: many high-stakes modern conversations about power—academic, political, legal, media—are conducted in them (especially in English).
English: meanings of “power” (Merriam-Webster)
Here are some of the meanings of “power” in English that we learn when we open Merriam-Webster. I will go ahead and bold some key words that appear in these definitions and, I believe, can help us better understand the meaning of “power” in English.
So, “power” in English can be understood as “ability to act or produce an effect,” “legal or official authority, capacity, or right,” “possession of control, authority, or influence over others” (also “one having such power—specifically: a sovereign state”), “a controlling group,” “a force of armed men” (archaic), “physical might,” “mental or moral efficacy,” “political control or influence.”
These are all meanings related to people and their relationships—what I call here social power. However, there are also meanings not related to social power, and they are also worth mentioning. These meanings include “an order of angels” (in Christianity), “the number of times as indicated by an exponent that a number occurs as a factor” and “the product itself,” “cardinal number” (in one of its meanings), “a source or means of supplying energy” (especially “electricity”), “motive power” (which applies to motion in machinery), “the time rate at which work is done or energy emitted or transferred,” “magnification” (in one of its meanings), “scope” (in some of its meanings), and “the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis in a statistical test when a particular alternative hypothesis happens to be true.”
“Power” can also be a verb and an adjective. As a verb, it can mean “to supply with power and especially motive power,” “to give impetus to,” “to move about by means of motive power,” and “to move with great speed or force.” As an adjective, it can mean “operated mechanically or electrically rather than manually,” “of, relating to, or utilizing strength,” and “having prestige, or influence.”
Here are the words that I bolded: ability, effect, authority, capacity, right, control, influence, force, might, energy, impetus, strength, prestige. All these words can describe people, what they do, or relationships between them. Hence they can be considered different aspect of social power.
First of all, what this list suggests (in my opinion) is that “power” describes something that permeates people’s lives. If it wasn’t pervasive, its definition would be short and specific. Another thing I notice just by looking at this list is that power is not something explicitly good or bad, but it can be interpreted as good or bad based on circumstances. For example, being in control can be perceived as something positive (“She is in control of her life”)—or as something negative (“Stop trying to control me!”). You have probably heard conversations about people “in power” who do bad things to other people. On the other hand, we are all familiar with the word “empowerment,” which is seen as something clearly positive.
Russian: no single direct equivalent
Let’s now move to the next language on my list: Russian (which happens to be my mother tongue). Notably, the English word "power" does not have a single direct equivalent in Russian. What I mean is that in Russian, there is no one word that covers the same wide range of meanings as "power" does in English. Instead, Russian tends to distribute those meanings across several words, each of which overlaps with some English uses of "power" (which is similar to the situation with the word zybkiy mentioned earlier).
Rather than giving one long list (which can blur important distinctions), it is more accurate to group the Russian options by which sense of “power” is meant in context:
To reiterate: Russian can absolutely talk about what English speakers call “power,” but it typically does so by choosing among these more specific words—depending on whether the intended meaning is authority, influence, physical strength, technical output, a mathematical exponent, or a geopolitical “power.”
To remind you, the words I extracted from the Merriam-Webster definitions were these: ability, effect, authority, capacity, right, control, influence, force, might, energy, impetus, strength, prestige. The Russian groupings above reinforce many of the same themes (authority/control; influence; force/might; technical energy/output) while also making a few distinctions harder to miss—especially the split between formal authorization (полномочия), influence/sway (влияние), and domination/rule (господство), and the clear separation of technical power (мощность) from social power (власть).
Spanish and French: “poder” and “pouvoir” as noun and as “can”
Turning to Spanish, we get a very similar list of meanings. Some additional definitions related to social power that we find here include “power of attorney” (one of the meanings of “el poder”), “drive” (for “la energía”), “pressure” (for “la fuerza”), and “clout, hold” (for “la influencia”). In Spanish we also find one especially important detail: the main translation of power is “poder”; it is a noun, but also a verb that can be translated into English as “can.”
We find a similar situation in French, where the noun “pouvoir”—the main translation of “power” to French—is also the verb meaning “can.” This parallelism with Spanish is not surprising, since these two languages are closely related through their common ancestor, Latin (more recent than the Proto-Indo-European one).
Once Spanish and French put the “power/can” link in plain sight, it becomes easier to notice related patterns elsewhere.
German: no noun/verb pairing, but similar meaning clusters
German does not show the same tidy noun/verb pairing (“power” as a noun that is also “can” as a verb). But German does offer familiar translations of power that include “force,” “might,” “strength,” “sway,” “output,” “vigor,” “energy,” “potency,” “capacity,” and related terms.
Some German glosses also foreground social-power meanings such as violence (Gewalt), warrant/authorization (Befugnis), and dominance/rule (Herrschaft). These sit comfortably in the influence zone.
At the same time, one of the main German translations of power is Macht, and it is often connected (via Proto-Germanic maganą, “to be able/may”) to the broader “be able / may” family of meanings—a connection that resonates with the Russian мочь / мощь cluster even though the modern grammar works differently.
“Can,” “know,” and “may”: ability, knowledge, permission
A few more words need to be said about the modal verb “can.” In English, it is related to German “können” and comes from Old English “cunnan,” which meant “to know”—and could mean “know how to.” Notably, in modern Spanish and French, the verb that means “to know” is used in some contexts to express “to be able to” (as in “No sé cantar” = “I can’t sing”). In Russian, the synonym of “мочь” (mentioned earlier) is “уметь,” which has the root “ум” (“mind”)—thus, the reference to knowledge as a prerequisite to being able to do something is present there as well.
Notably, in Old English, different words were used for “be able to” and “know how to”; yet another word was used to express “may.” Nowadays they are all translated into modern English as “can” (I found this crucial piece of information in Alfraed Grammaticus by Megan Renz Perry). Indeed, you might notice that “can” is sometimes used to discuss abilities (“I can sing opera,” meaning I have this skill), and sometimes it is used to discuss what we are allowed to do (“I can sing in this room,” meaning I am allowed to sing in this space; I have a right to do that; I won’t be punished if I do that).
Ability, influence, and “may” power (a combined working map)
At this point, based on this limited (and admittedly superficial) comparison of five Indo-European languages, two large themes start to emerge in how these languages invite us to talk about social power: ability and influence.
This is a heuristic, not a strict taxonomy. Some words naturally belong in both areas, depending on context. Still, the distinction is useful enough to sketch:
Ability: ability, capacity, energy, impetus, strength, force, vigor, vitality, faculty, aptitude, competency, productivity (the focus is on what a person can do—capacity, skill, strength, energy, competence)
Influence: effect, authority, right, control, force, influence, might, rule, dominion, grip, sway, proxy, prestige, impact, action (the focus is on effects in the social world—impact on others, control, authority, rule, domination, sway)
(I intentionally place “force” in both categories.)
The difference is subtle but important. Ability is often described as something a person has (or lacks): a capacity, a skill, a strength, a competence. Influence is inherently relational: it describes what happens between people—how one person affects another, shapes outcomes, sets limits, or redirects possibilities. The sheer number of words and sub-meanings devoted to these areas suggests that abilities and influences are treated as consequential features of human life—worth naming in many nuanced ways.
A third dimension becomes visible once we pay attention to modal verbs like can—a dimension that connects ability to permission.
In everyday English, can sometimes refers to ability (“I can sing opera,” meaning I have the skill), and sometimes to permission (“I can sing in this room,” meaning it is allowed; I won’t be punished; I have the right or standing to do it). Historically, English distinguished these ideas more clearly (see the previous section), but modern usage often compresses them.
This “being allowed to” dimension sits on the boundary between ability and influence. It can feel like something that “belongs” to a person (a right, a license, a status), but it also plainly reflects relationships, rules, and enforceable expectations—other people’s power to permit, restrict, reward, or punish.
In other words, looking across these five languages suggests a practical working map for what we can call social power: power as ability, power as influence, and a third form that can be described as “may” power—the power (or powerlessness) involved in what one is allowed or disallowed to do.
A tentative excursion into Sanskrit
Now, I would like to take a look into yet one more language: Sanskrit. The reason for this choice lies in the importance of Indian thought and philosophy in my personal life and scholarship (for example, see here).
Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism; it is the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism. Sanskrit belongs to the same Indo-European family as Russian, English, German, Spanish, and French; but it is more conservative in some features (especially in its older Vedic forms) that are important for reconstructing Proto-Indo-European than most modern languages are.
As with the modern languages I looked at earlier, Sanskrit does not funnel everything English calls “power” into a single word: it draws on a range of power-related terms whose meanings shift with context (physical strength, authority, potency, divine power, and so on). For my purposes here, I’ll focus on two especially useful terms--utsāha and shakti—because they cover a wide and conceptually revealing part of that field, even though they are not the only options.
The Sanskrit word utsāha can be translated back into English as “enthusiasm,” “zeal,” “energy,” “strength,” “power,” “fortitude,” “strength of will,” “resolution,” “firmness,” “effort,” “endurance,” “perseverance,” “cheerfulness,” “joy,” “happiness,” “initiative,” and “drive.” These meanings have some intersections with the meanings of power in English, Russian, German, Spanish, and French. In these five languages, we already saw “strength,” “drive,” “energy,” and a few related words.
But Sanskrit’s “utsāha” also offers some important additions that give us more food for thought. For example, we can think of power as something associated with effort—something that requires endurance. Indeed, this meaning is also present in the English phrasal verb “power through,” which stands for “to continue in a determined and strong manner until the end of something, even when it’s difficult.” We can also think about the link between power and joy. The five languages we looked into earlier similarly suggest that the word “power” and its meanings are not seen as something plainly negative or positive. For example, language signals that power is related to domination and violence, but also to energy and empowerment.
The Sanskrit word shakti can be translated as “energy, ability, strength, effort, power, might, capability”—which are all important themes present in the five modern languages that I have briefly analyzed. But, interestingly, "shakti" is much more than just a word to describe people’s abilities and influences. In Hinduism, Shakti is a goddess, or even the Universal Power that sustains all existence. It is the primordial cosmic energy that flows through the universe.
In many Hindu traditions, Shakti refers not only to “power” in the everyday sense, but to a more expansive idea: a fundamental creative energy (often personified as feminine) through which existence is sustained and transformed. Read this way, “power” is not confined to social relationships or individual capacities. It can be imagined as something pervasive—present in nature, in living bodies, and in the processes that generate change.
Notably, this vision of power goes beyond dividing power into “social” and “not social,” as I suggested earlier. It treats power as something that exists everywhere—in humans and beyond them, throughout the universe.
Provisional conclusions: what language encourages me to track
Taking language as a hint rather than a verdict, I arrive at several working distinctions worth tracking through the rest of this project:
Notably, language keeps highlighting power’s duality or neutrality: words tied to domination, violence, coercion, and control sit alongside words tied to energy, productivity, drive, initiative, and empowerment. And it might be worth paying special attention to power as energy—not only in the everyday modern sense (electricity, motive power, strength), but also in the more philosophical sense suggested by Sanskrit traditions.
Linguists group languages into families: languages in the same family share a reconstructed ancestor (a “proto-language”). Families can nest inside larger families. Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese belong to the Romance family; Romance languages are part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many languages native to Europe and parts of South Asia.
Indo-European includes very diverse languages—English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindustani among them. That does not mean modern forms look similar, but faint resemblances sometimes surface in surprising ways. One example I found personally striking: the Russian verb буди́ть (budít’, “to wake (someone) up”) is cognate with the Sanskrit root budh- (“to awaken / become aware”), which is also behind Buddha (“awakened”).
That said, dividing languages into families can be tricky. Modern languages also share words through borrowing, and borrowing is not the same as common descent. Estimates of how many language families exist vary widely, and I’m not trying to adjudicate that debate here.
So my goal is modest: I’ll look at “power” in English, Russian, Spanish, French, and German—languages I can all read and speak to some extent. Spanish and French are Romance; English and German are Germanic; Russian is Balto-Slavic. All of these are Indo-European, and (at a high level) can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European.
Clearly, this does not justify conclusions about “power” across all cultures and language families. But Indo-European languages do matter for my purposes for a practical reason: many high-stakes modern conversations about power—academic, political, legal, media—are conducted in them (especially in English).
English: meanings of “power” (Merriam-Webster)
Here are some of the meanings of “power” in English that we learn when we open Merriam-Webster. I will go ahead and bold some key words that appear in these definitions and, I believe, can help us better understand the meaning of “power” in English.
So, “power” in English can be understood as “ability to act or produce an effect,” “legal or official authority, capacity, or right,” “possession of control, authority, or influence over others” (also “one having such power—specifically: a sovereign state”), “a controlling group,” “a force of armed men” (archaic), “physical might,” “mental or moral efficacy,” “political control or influence.”
These are all meanings related to people and their relationships—what I call here social power. However, there are also meanings not related to social power, and they are also worth mentioning. These meanings include “an order of angels” (in Christianity), “the number of times as indicated by an exponent that a number occurs as a factor” and “the product itself,” “cardinal number” (in one of its meanings), “a source or means of supplying energy” (especially “electricity”), “motive power” (which applies to motion in machinery), “the time rate at which work is done or energy emitted or transferred,” “magnification” (in one of its meanings), “scope” (in some of its meanings), and “the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis in a statistical test when a particular alternative hypothesis happens to be true.”
“Power” can also be a verb and an adjective. As a verb, it can mean “to supply with power and especially motive power,” “to give impetus to,” “to move about by means of motive power,” and “to move with great speed or force.” As an adjective, it can mean “operated mechanically or electrically rather than manually,” “of, relating to, or utilizing strength,” and “having prestige, or influence.”
Here are the words that I bolded: ability, effect, authority, capacity, right, control, influence, force, might, energy, impetus, strength, prestige. All these words can describe people, what they do, or relationships between them. Hence they can be considered different aspect of social power.
First of all, what this list suggests (in my opinion) is that “power” describes something that permeates people’s lives. If it wasn’t pervasive, its definition would be short and specific. Another thing I notice just by looking at this list is that power is not something explicitly good or bad, but it can be interpreted as good or bad based on circumstances. For example, being in control can be perceived as something positive (“She is in control of her life”)—or as something negative (“Stop trying to control me!”). You have probably heard conversations about people “in power” who do bad things to other people. On the other hand, we are all familiar with the word “empowerment,” which is seen as something clearly positive.
Russian: no single direct equivalent
Let’s now move to the next language on my list: Russian (which happens to be my mother tongue). Notably, the English word "power" does not have a single direct equivalent in Russian. What I mean is that in Russian, there is no one word that covers the same wide range of meanings as "power" does in English. Instead, Russian tends to distribute those meanings across several words, each of which overlaps with some English uses of "power" (which is similar to the situation with the word zybkiy mentioned earlier).
Rather than giving one long list (which can blur important distinctions), it is more accurate to group the Russian options by which sense of “power” is meant in context:
- Social / political power (authority, rule, control):
власть (authority, rule, power over others); полномочия (formal authority/authorization; powers/mandate); влияние (influence, sway); могущество (might, power in the sense of great strength or dominance); господство (domination, rule) - Strength / force / might (capacity to exert force):
сила (strength, force); мощь (might, power; often elevated or emphatic) - Technical “power” (physics/engineering output, wattage):
мощность (power/output, capacity in the technical sense) - Mathematical “power” (exponent):
степень (power in the sense of exponent; also degree/level) - A “power” as a state (“a great power”):
держава (a great power/state; in a historical/political register) - Religious / supernatural uses (“higher powers,” “powers” as forces):
высшие силы / сверхъестественные силы (higher powers / supernatural forces); бог / божество (God/deity, in contexts where English uses “a higher power”)
To reiterate: Russian can absolutely talk about what English speakers call “power,” but it typically does so by choosing among these more specific words—depending on whether the intended meaning is authority, influence, physical strength, technical output, a mathematical exponent, or a geopolitical “power.”
To remind you, the words I extracted from the Merriam-Webster definitions were these: ability, effect, authority, capacity, right, control, influence, force, might, energy, impetus, strength, prestige. The Russian groupings above reinforce many of the same themes (authority/control; influence; force/might; technical energy/output) while also making a few distinctions harder to miss—especially the split between formal authorization (полномочия), influence/sway (влияние), and domination/rule (господство), and the clear separation of technical power (мощность) from social power (власть).
Spanish and French: “poder” and “pouvoir” as noun and as “can”
Turning to Spanish, we get a very similar list of meanings. Some additional definitions related to social power that we find here include “power of attorney” (one of the meanings of “el poder”), “drive” (for “la energía”), “pressure” (for “la fuerza”), and “clout, hold” (for “la influencia”). In Spanish we also find one especially important detail: the main translation of power is “poder”; it is a noun, but also a verb that can be translated into English as “can.”
We find a similar situation in French, where the noun “pouvoir”—the main translation of “power” to French—is also the verb meaning “can.” This parallelism with Spanish is not surprising, since these two languages are closely related through their common ancestor, Latin (more recent than the Proto-Indo-European one).
Once Spanish and French put the “power/can” link in plain sight, it becomes easier to notice related patterns elsewhere.
- In English, can expresses ability (“to be able to”), which aligns naturally with the ability theme.
- In Russian, “can” is translated with мочь (e.g., я могу = “I can”), which shares a root neighborhood with мощь, one of the Russian words that can translate power (“power, might, capacity…”). Etymologically, that cluster points back toward an older Indo-European idea of “being able.”
German: no noun/verb pairing, but similar meaning clusters
German does not show the same tidy noun/verb pairing (“power” as a noun that is also “can” as a verb). But German does offer familiar translations of power that include “force,” “might,” “strength,” “sway,” “output,” “vigor,” “energy,” “potency,” “capacity,” and related terms.
Some German glosses also foreground social-power meanings such as violence (Gewalt), warrant/authorization (Befugnis), and dominance/rule (Herrschaft). These sit comfortably in the influence zone.
At the same time, one of the main German translations of power is Macht, and it is often connected (via Proto-Germanic maganą, “to be able/may”) to the broader “be able / may” family of meanings—a connection that resonates with the Russian мочь / мощь cluster even though the modern grammar works differently.
“Can,” “know,” and “may”: ability, knowledge, permission
A few more words need to be said about the modal verb “can.” In English, it is related to German “können” and comes from Old English “cunnan,” which meant “to know”—and could mean “know how to.” Notably, in modern Spanish and French, the verb that means “to know” is used in some contexts to express “to be able to” (as in “No sé cantar” = “I can’t sing”). In Russian, the synonym of “мочь” (mentioned earlier) is “уметь,” which has the root “ум” (“mind”)—thus, the reference to knowledge as a prerequisite to being able to do something is present there as well.
Notably, in Old English, different words were used for “be able to” and “know how to”; yet another word was used to express “may.” Nowadays they are all translated into modern English as “can” (I found this crucial piece of information in Alfraed Grammaticus by Megan Renz Perry). Indeed, you might notice that “can” is sometimes used to discuss abilities (“I can sing opera,” meaning I have this skill), and sometimes it is used to discuss what we are allowed to do (“I can sing in this room,” meaning I am allowed to sing in this space; I have a right to do that; I won’t be punished if I do that).
Ability, influence, and “may” power (a combined working map)
At this point, based on this limited (and admittedly superficial) comparison of five Indo-European languages, two large themes start to emerge in how these languages invite us to talk about social power: ability and influence.
This is a heuristic, not a strict taxonomy. Some words naturally belong in both areas, depending on context. Still, the distinction is useful enough to sketch:
Ability: ability, capacity, energy, impetus, strength, force, vigor, vitality, faculty, aptitude, competency, productivity (the focus is on what a person can do—capacity, skill, strength, energy, competence)
Influence: effect, authority, right, control, force, influence, might, rule, dominion, grip, sway, proxy, prestige, impact, action (the focus is on effects in the social world—impact on others, control, authority, rule, domination, sway)
(I intentionally place “force” in both categories.)
The difference is subtle but important. Ability is often described as something a person has (or lacks): a capacity, a skill, a strength, a competence. Influence is inherently relational: it describes what happens between people—how one person affects another, shapes outcomes, sets limits, or redirects possibilities. The sheer number of words and sub-meanings devoted to these areas suggests that abilities and influences are treated as consequential features of human life—worth naming in many nuanced ways.
A third dimension becomes visible once we pay attention to modal verbs like can—a dimension that connects ability to permission.
In everyday English, can sometimes refers to ability (“I can sing opera,” meaning I have the skill), and sometimes to permission (“I can sing in this room,” meaning it is allowed; I won’t be punished; I have the right or standing to do it). Historically, English distinguished these ideas more clearly (see the previous section), but modern usage often compresses them.
This “being allowed to” dimension sits on the boundary between ability and influence. It can feel like something that “belongs” to a person (a right, a license, a status), but it also plainly reflects relationships, rules, and enforceable expectations—other people’s power to permit, restrict, reward, or punish.
In other words, looking across these five languages suggests a practical working map for what we can call social power: power as ability, power as influence, and a third form that can be described as “may” power—the power (or powerlessness) involved in what one is allowed or disallowed to do.
A tentative excursion into Sanskrit
Now, I would like to take a look into yet one more language: Sanskrit. The reason for this choice lies in the importance of Indian thought and philosophy in my personal life and scholarship (for example, see here).
Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism; it is the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism. Sanskrit belongs to the same Indo-European family as Russian, English, German, Spanish, and French; but it is more conservative in some features (especially in its older Vedic forms) that are important for reconstructing Proto-Indo-European than most modern languages are.
As with the modern languages I looked at earlier, Sanskrit does not funnel everything English calls “power” into a single word: it draws on a range of power-related terms whose meanings shift with context (physical strength, authority, potency, divine power, and so on). For my purposes here, I’ll focus on two especially useful terms--utsāha and shakti—because they cover a wide and conceptually revealing part of that field, even though they are not the only options.
The Sanskrit word utsāha can be translated back into English as “enthusiasm,” “zeal,” “energy,” “strength,” “power,” “fortitude,” “strength of will,” “resolution,” “firmness,” “effort,” “endurance,” “perseverance,” “cheerfulness,” “joy,” “happiness,” “initiative,” and “drive.” These meanings have some intersections with the meanings of power in English, Russian, German, Spanish, and French. In these five languages, we already saw “strength,” “drive,” “energy,” and a few related words.
But Sanskrit’s “utsāha” also offers some important additions that give us more food for thought. For example, we can think of power as something associated with effort—something that requires endurance. Indeed, this meaning is also present in the English phrasal verb “power through,” which stands for “to continue in a determined and strong manner until the end of something, even when it’s difficult.” We can also think about the link between power and joy. The five languages we looked into earlier similarly suggest that the word “power” and its meanings are not seen as something plainly negative or positive. For example, language signals that power is related to domination and violence, but also to energy and empowerment.
The Sanskrit word shakti can be translated as “energy, ability, strength, effort, power, might, capability”—which are all important themes present in the five modern languages that I have briefly analyzed. But, interestingly, "shakti" is much more than just a word to describe people’s abilities and influences. In Hinduism, Shakti is a goddess, or even the Universal Power that sustains all existence. It is the primordial cosmic energy that flows through the universe.
In many Hindu traditions, Shakti refers not only to “power” in the everyday sense, but to a more expansive idea: a fundamental creative energy (often personified as feminine) through which existence is sustained and transformed. Read this way, “power” is not confined to social relationships or individual capacities. It can be imagined as something pervasive—present in nature, in living bodies, and in the processes that generate change.
Notably, this vision of power goes beyond dividing power into “social” and “not social,” as I suggested earlier. It treats power as something that exists everywhere—in humans and beyond them, throughout the universe.
Provisional conclusions: what language encourages me to track
Taking language as a hint rather than a verdict, I arrive at several working distinctions worth tracking through the rest of this project:
- Power as ability (capacity, competence, energy, strength)
- Power as influence (impact, control, authority, sway, domination)
- “May” power (permission, allowance, legitimacy—what one is allowed or disallowed to do)
- Power as (universal) energy (this idea goes beyond dividing power into good and bad, social and non-s0cial)
Notably, language keeps highlighting power’s duality or neutrality: words tied to domination, violence, coercion, and control sit alongside words tied to energy, productivity, drive, initiative, and empowerment. And it might be worth paying special attention to power as energy—not only in the everyday modern sense (electricity, motive power, strength), but also in the more philosophical sense suggested by Sanskrit traditions.