The word "intelligentsia," according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, entered the English vocabulary in 1920. Its source was undoubtedly Russian, where it first became current in the early 1860s and a decade later acquired the status of a household word. The Russian etymology of "intelligentsia" has long been a subject of controversy. The question recently acquired additional interest when a young American scholar, Mr. Alan Pollard, demonstrated that the novelist P. D. Boborykin, who liked to take credit for introducing the word into Russian, had no right to the claim. Without going into this complicated matter, I should like to call attention to evidence indicating that the German word Intelligenz was used as early as 1849 to describe the same phenomenon as "intelligentsia," namely, a group distinguished from the rest of society by its education and "progressive" attitude. The fact that this usage antedates the Russian by more than a decade suggests that die Intelligenz may have been the direct inspiration for the Russian concept.