Neurodiversity glossary — 44 terms defining neurodivergent experience

What is neurodiversity?

Neurodiversity is the fact of all different: the variation in human nervous systems, as plain and as universal as variation in faces or fingerprints. Like the ecological word it was built on, it names a property only a population can have. A rainforest is diverse; a fern is not. A workforce, a classroom or a family is neurodiverse by default, and there has never been any other kind. The word for an individual who diverges from the norm is neurodivergent; “a neurodiverse person”, the phrase you will hear most often, is a slip that says more than it means to.

The word assembled itself in the late 1990s, in the first internet gatherings of autistic adults — mailing lists, forums, the earliest rooms of the medium. The sociologist Judy Singer is generally credited with the coinage, in her 1998 honours thesis; in her own words, from ‘Neurodiversity, the birth of an idea’: “I am generally credited with coining the word, and [American writer] Harvey Blume for being first in print.” Both have since described it as collective, and research published in 2024 documents how the concept grew out of those communities rather than from any single author. It was born, fittingly, among people who had first been brought together by a diagnosis.

Singer drew on the disability rights movement and its social model: the idea that much of what disables people lies in environments, attitudes and expectations rather than in their bodies. Just as buildings can be made accessible to wheelchair users, schools, workplaces and services can be made to fit a wider range of minds. That argument did lasting good. It moved the conversation out of the clinic, damaged stigma, and gave people a language for their own experience and permission to live openly with it.

In the two decades since, neurodiversity has become a movement and then a sector — first among online communities of autistic self-advocates, then in research, policy, training and hiring. Its central premise, in one well-cited formulation, is that “variations in neurological development and functioning across humans are a natural and valuable part of human variation and therefore not necessarily pathological.” Self-advocacy organisations carry that premise into education, work, healthcare and law.

Something happened to the word along the way, and it is worth seeing clearly. “Diversity” had already spent fifteen years in corporate personnel departments when the prefix was added, and the new word’s career followed the old one’s: neurodiversity in the workplace, neurodiversity training, the business case for neurodiversity. Read with the first meaning restored, those phrases collapse. Every workplace is already neurodiverse; you cannot introduce what is everywhere, or train what is simply a fact. They only make sense because the word has quietly shrunk to mean the diagnosed few. The Neurodiversity Book uses the word in its first sense — the fact about all of us — and so does the Directory.

That first sense is also the most useful one. If neurodiversity is about everyone, the question stops being how to fit a minority into environments built for a majority, and becomes what it would take for any nervous system to run coherently in the conditions it is actually in: steered from within, matched to those conditions, and not overwhelmed faster than it can take things in. The people we call neurodivergent feel the answer’s absence first and hardest. They are not the only people it applies to.

Understanding neurodiversity’s scope and impact requires looking at the numbers — from diagnostic prevalence to employment gaps to educational outcomes. Our neurodiversity statistics page compiles the latest research and data documenting neurodivergent experiences across society.

At its core, neurodiversity promotes several key ideas:

• Diversity is natural:

  variation in nervous systems is a property of every human population, as ordinary as biodiversity in an ecosystem. No one stands outside it, and no population has ever lacked it.

• Strengths and challenges coexist:

  the same tuning that makes one task easy makes another costly. Deep focus, fast association or sensitivity to detail are real strengths in some settings and real burdens in others; framing them only as gifts, or only as deficits, loses half the picture.

• The social model of disability:

  much of what disables people lies in their conditions — noise, pace, rigid schedules, unclear expectations, stigma — rather than in the differences themselves. The Directory’s reading adds one correction: those conditions were not built for “neurotypical” people either. They were built for throughput and calibrated to an average nobody is, which is why they strain almost everyone, and strain neurodivergent people first.

• Inclusion benefits everyone, by definition:

  adjustments made for neurodivergent people — quieter space, flexible hours, clear written instructions, fewer interruptions — serve almost everyone. That is the strongest evidence that the problem was the design, not the people, and the strongest argument for building it in from the start rather than granting it through a diagnosis.

Key figures and publications in neurodiversity:

Judy Singer (Sociologist & Advocate)

Singer, an autistic sociologist, is credited with coining the term neurodiversity in her 1998 honours thesis. She argued for a social model of disability, emphasising that neurological differences are part of human diversity rather than medical deficits. Her work laid the foundation for the movement, shifting the focus from “curing” conditions like autism to creating inclusive environments.

Harvey Blume (Journalist & Early Advocate)

Blume helped popularise the term neurodiversity in a 1998 Atlantic article, comparing its importance to biodiversity. He highlighted the contributions of autistic individuals to society, reinforcing the idea that diverse ways of thinking drive innovation and progress.

Jim Sinclair (Autistic Activist & Founder of ANI)

Jim Sinclair was a pioneering autistic advocate whose 1993 speech, “Don’t Mourn for Us,” fundamentally changed how autism was viewed. Sinclair rejected the idea that autism was a tragedy and instead called for acceptance and respect. As a founder of Autism Network International (ANI), Sinclair helped create one of the first self-advocacy movements for autistic individuals.

Temple Grandin (Autistic Scientist & Author)

Dr. Temple Grandin is one of the most well-known autistic individuals in the world. Her books, including Thinking in Pictures and The Autistic Brain, have provided insight into sensory processing, problem-solving, and the strengths of autistic minds, helping shift public perception.

Steve Silberman (Science Journalist & Author of NeuroTribes)

Steve Silberman’s 2015 book NeuroTribes brought the neurodiversity movement to mainstream attention. Silverman’s book chronicles the history of autism and argues that neurodivergent individuals have always been integral to human progress but were historically misunderstood.

Kassiane Asasumasu (Activist)

The multiply neurodivergent activist who coined “neurodivergent” around the turn of the millennium, giving the movement a word a person could use for themselves. She made it deliberately wide: any divergence, from any direction. See neurodivergent.

Monique Botha and colleagues (2024)

“The neurodiversity concept was developed collectively”, in Autism: the research documenting that the idea grew out of the online communities of autistic people in the 1990s, rather than from a single author, which is how Singer and Blume have also described it.

Ronnie Cane (Author of The Neurodiversity Book & Founder of The Neurodiversity Directory)

Cane’s The Neurodiversity Book (first edition 2025, second edition 2026) argues that what we call neurodiversity is, at root, a question of coherence: whether a system’s steering comes from within it, is matched to the conditions it actually runs in, and arrives at a rate it can take. Read that way, the rise in diagnoses is not an outbreak of disorder but a spreading mismatch between people and the conditions they are judged against, and the idea of normal, with the apparatus built to diagnose and treat departures from it, is the same incoherence at the scale of institutions. Cane founded The Neurodiversity Directory as the systemic application of this framework — building the editorial and infrastructural substrate for a field that moves from progressive awareness to accountability of progress, and from ‘special’ accommodation to serious structural change. The Directory’s coverage spans every vertical of neurodivergent provision and treats the gap between academia, frameworks, and lived experience — particularly within workplaces, schools, and healthcare systems — as the territory where the discourse is currently being tested.