The word once meant wholeness, a thing unbroken. It described objects before it described character.
Integrity comes from the Latin integer, meaning whole, complete, or untouched, from in- (not) and tangere (to touch). The noun integritas described a state of being undamaged, entire, intact.1 When the word entered English in the fifteenth century, it still carried that physical sense. An intact structure had integrity. A coin that had not been clipped had integrity.
The moral sense followed. By the sixteenth century, integrity had come to describe a person whose principles remained whole under pressure, someone who had not been broken by circumstance or corrupted by incentive.2 The metaphor is structural. A person of integrity is a person who has not cracked.
The Latin root integer also gave English the mathematical term "integer," a whole number, and "integrate," to make whole. All three words describe the same condition from different angles: completeness, the absence of fracture, the state of being undivided.3
In professional life, integrity is now the most frequently cited value on corporate websites and in mission statements. A 2003 survey by the Ethics Resource Center found that 76 percent of American employees had observed misconduct in the workplace in the previous year.4 The word that once meant wholeness now describes the distance between what organizations say and what people inside them observe.