Word.ws English Dictionary

cancel culture

cancel culture noun: the cultural phenomenon of publicly shaming, rejecting, and ceasing to provide support to people, companies, stores, etc. that are deemed unacceptable, and calling on others to boycott them.

Noun

cancel culture (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory, neologism, often) The cultural phenomenon of publicly shaming, rejecting, and ceasing to provide support to people, companies, stores, etc. that are deemed unacceptable, and calling on others to boycott them.
    • Ms. Nakamura said that cancel culture was born of a desire for control. People have limited power over what is presented to them on social media platforms, which are notorious for being poorly regulated.2018 June 28, Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Everyone Is Canceled”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 20 Apr 2020
    • With roots in Black Twitter, cancel culture is an unavoidable mainstay of our infotainment age. In an era of too much everything—TV, opinions, news—we’ve come to rely on a vocabulary of consolidation: likes, tweets, emoji. Cancel culture is one of these argots—a governor, a self-regulatory device I...2018 October 5, Jason Parham, “The Devolution of Kanye West and the Case for Cancel Culture”, in Wired

cancel culture meaning in Tamil, Malay and Indonesian

cancel culture in Tamil

நீக்கல் போக்கு

cancel culture in Malay

cultural phenomenon
budaya pembatalan

cancel culture in Indonesian

cultural phenomenon
budaya pembatalan

Examples of cancel culture in a sentence

  • With roots in Black Twitter, cancel culture is an unavoidable mainstay of our infotainment age.2018 October 5, Jason Parham, “The Devolution of Kanye West and the Case for Cancel Culture”, in Wired:
  • Today, I fear that we are making dismissing people the cool thing to do with “cancel culture.”2019, Tayo Rockson, Use Your Difference to Make a Difference:
  • Cancel culture has reared its ugly head ... again.2019 September 3, David French, “Here’s One Way to Stop Cancel Culture — Stop Canceling”, in National Review:
  • "[…] Many students have adopted the posture of cancel culture, preventing people they don’t agree with from speaking,” Mr.2020 February 6, Mattia Ferraresi, “Cancel Culture Comes to France”, in Wall Street Journal:

Questions about cancel culture

What does cancel culture mean?
Cancel culture means the cultural phenomenon of publicly shaming, rejecting, and ceasing to provide support to people, companies, stores, etc. that are deemed unacceptable, and calling on others to boycott them.
What is cancel culture in Tamil?
Cancel culture in Tamil is நீக்கல் போக்கு. See Cancel culture meaning in Tamil.
How do you use cancel culture in a sentence?
With roots in Black Twitter, cancel culture is an unavoidable mainstay of our infotainment age.
What part of speech is cancel culture?
Cancel culture is a noun.

Words near cancel culture in the dictionary

  1. cancaneuses
  2. cancanned
  3. cancanning
  4. cancans
  5. cancel
  6. cancel culture
  7. cancel out
  8. cancel someone's Christmas
  9. cancel-worthy
  10. cancelability
  11. cancelable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cancel culture (page history and authors); cancel culture (Tamil Wiktionary) (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-cancel culture.wav.

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