Tory: [17] The term tory originally denoted an Irish guerrilla, one of a group of Irishmen who in the 1640s were thrown off their property by the British and took to a life of harrying and plundering the British occupiers (it is an anglicization of Irish *tóraighe ‘pursuer’, which was derived from tóir ‘pursue’). In the 1670s it was applied as a term of abuse to Irish Catholic royalists, and then more generally to supporters of the Catholic James II, and after 1689 it came to be used for the members of the British political party that had at first opposed the removal of James and his replacement with the Protestant William and Mary.
