## Summary The Overton window is a term that describes the spectrum of "acceptable" opinions on a particular topic or within a particular field. It is used most commonly to refer to political discourse, but can be employed in discussions about pop culture, current events, and even academic theory. A belief is considered to be "outside" the Overton window if it is highly controversial, to the degree that it may not be able to be expressed in public without significant pushback. The "window" referred to by this term is conceptualized as a range within a sliding scale that spans one extreme to the other. Because this is somewhat reductive, it can help to break down the sliding scale by individual issues, each with a respective window of acceptable opinion. Note that this range can and does sometimes split into two or more separate ranges, each finding a receptive audience among people in a particular group. The advent of the internet has made this far more common, as increasing public access to otherwise-atomized groups and algorithmic bucketing has caused peoples' social spheres to shift significantly based on their overall predilections, thus allowing statements to naturally find a receptive audience so long as they stay reasonably within their group's orthodoxy. ## History The Overton window is named after Joseph Overton, a political analyst who was working for a public policy think tank in the 1990s. He proposed the concept as a way to forecast public reactions to proposed policies based on how far away they were from established policy and norms.[^1] [^1]: Per [Wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)