The word was coined to describe Irish landlords who collected rent from land they never visited.
The word traces to the Latin verb abesse, meaning "to be away from," formed from ab ("off, away from") and esse ("to be").1 The adjective absent entered English in the late fourteenth century through Old French. The noun absentee appeared around 1530, and for most of its early life, it carried a specific political charge.
When the suffix -ism was attached in 1822, the resulting word absenteeism did not describe workers missing shifts. It described a system of property ownership in which Anglo-Irish landlords lived in England while collecting rent from Irish tenants they never saw.2 Samuel Johnson's dictionary had already noted the landlord sense of absentee. The earlier form absenteeship had appeared as early as 1778.
The meaning did not shift to its modern workplace usage until 1922, a full century after the word was coined.3 The transition coincided with the rise of factory timekeeping systems and the formalization of employment contracts that defined when, exactly, a worker was expected to appear. In earlier arrangements, where labor was seasonal or task-based, the concept of being absent in a punishable sense did not apply.
The word now appears almost exclusively in organizational contexts, measuring the gap between an employer's expectation and a worker's presence. Its Latin root, a verb meaning simply "to be away," carries none of that judgment.