Word.ws English Dictionary

animatism

animatism noun: the belief that everything is pervaded by a life force giving each inanimate object a consciousness or personality, but not a soul as in animism.

Noun

animatism (countable and uncountable, plural animatisms)

  1. The belief that everything is pervaded by a life force giving each inanimate object a consciousness or personality, but not a soul as in animism.

Forms of animatism

pluralanimatisms

Origin of animatism

From animate + -ism. Originally coined by British anthropologist Robert Marett to refer to "a belief in a generalized, impersonal power over which people have some measure of control".

Questions about animatism

What does animatism mean?
Animatism means the belief that everything is pervaded by a life force giving each inanimate object a consciousness or personality, but not a soul as in animism.
What part of speech is animatism?
Animatism is a noun.
What is the plural of animatism?
The plural of animatism is animatisms.

Words near animatism in the dictionary

  1. animation meme
  2. animation memes
  3. animation studio
  4. animational
  5. animations
  6. animatism
  7. animatisms
  8. animatist
  9. animatistic
  10. animatists
  11. animative

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: animatism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “animatism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/animatism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.