Word.ws English Dictionary

bien pensant

/ˌbyɛn pɛnˈsɑnt/

bien pensant adjective: right-thinking; orthodox, conformist.

Adjective

bien pensant (comparative more bien pensant, superlative most bien pensant)

  1. Right-thinking; orthodox, conformist.
    • He hopes Mr Abbott wins the election in part because it would, he says, annoy bien-pensant British journalists and Leftists who oppose the Australian's positions on things like abortion, gay marriage or climate change.2010 August 23, Bagehot, The Economist
    • My biggest beef is the idea that increasingly grips liberal thinkers desperate for anything radical – the concept of a universal income for all. Financially, behaviourally and organisationally bonkers, this idea is gaining traction on the bien pensant left.2017 March 13, Will Hutton, “Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman – review”, in The Guardian

Noun

bien pensant (plural bien pensants)

  1. A person who is bien pensant.
  2. Someone who accepts and/or espouses a fashionable idea after it has been established and maintains it without a great amount of critical thought.
    • Near-synonyms: follower, believer, conformist

Synonyms of bien pensant

Forms of bien pensant

Adjective
comparativemore bien pensant
superlativemost bien pensant
alternative formbien-pensant
Noun
pluralbien pensants

Origin of bien pensant

Borrowed from French bien-pensant (literally “well-thinking”).

Questions about bien pensant

What does bien pensant mean?
Bien pensant means right-thinking; orthodox, conformist.
What part of speech is bien pensant?
Bien pensant can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce bien pensant?
Bien pensant is pronounced /ˌbyɛn pɛnˈsɑnt/.

Words near bien pensant in the dictionary

  1. Bien
  2. bien cofe
  3. bien cofes
  4. bien cove
  5. bien coves
  6. bien pensant
  7. bien pensants
  8. Bien Unido
  9. bien-pensant
  10. bien-pensants
  11. Bienaime

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bien pensant (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: “bien pensant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bien_pensant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.