Meaning

(usually uncountable) The view that all endeavours are devoid of objective meaning..

Definitions by Sense

1. (usually uncountable) The view that all endeavours are devoid of objective meaning.
2. (usually uncountable) The rejection of, or opposition to, religious beliefs, (inherent or objective) moral principles, legal rules, etc., often due to the view that life is meaningless (sense 1).
3. (usually uncountable, politics) The rejection of non-proven or non-rationalized assertions in the social and political spheres of society.
4. (uncountable, psychiatry) A delusion that oneself or the world, or parts thereof, have ceased to exist.
5. (uncountable, Russia, politics, historical) Alternative letter-case form of Nihilism (“a Russian movement of the 1860s that rejected all authority and promoted the use of violence for political change”).
6. (countable, uncountable, philosophy) A doctrine grounded on the negation of one or more meaningful aspects of life; in particular, the view that nothing in the world actually exists.
7. (countable) Something that is regarded as meaningless.

Example Sentences

This classification should have led to the discovery and study of remedies which act specifically upon the various textures and tissues of the body, such as the cellular, serous, mucous, parenchymatous, fibrous, gelatinous, &c., but it did not, except in the most imperfect manner—so imperfect, in fact, that most pathologists, despairing of finding such remedies, at one time sank into all the peurilities^([sic – meaning puerilities]) of the "expectant mode" of the French, or the nihilisms of the German.

But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: [...] the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses; [...]

Anger at the system turned to anger against art. Damn that foolery too, which took, but never gave. A promise of achievement always withdrawn; an assurance of dignity and ease for ever vanishing over the skyline. The virus of communistic nihilism simmered within him, wishing to submerge all effort in an easily filled belly.

[T]he band members sweat hard enough to earn their pretensions, and maybe even their nihilism.

[W]hat is most terrifying—including the perennial threat of cowardly terrorists—is the insidious growth of deadening nihilisms across political lines, nihilisms that have been suffocating the deep democratic energies in America. In Race Matters, I examined the increasing nihilism in black America as the "lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness."

Word Forms

• nihilisms

Synonyms for nihilism

Antonyms for nihilism

Related Words

When Should You Use Nihilism?

Use nihilism when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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