Word.ws English Dictionary

Canutish

Canutish adjective: futilely attempting to stop the unstoppable.

Adjective

Canutish (comparative more Canutish, superlative most Canutish)

  1. Futilely attempting to stop the unstoppable.
    • Whether or not the more extreme expressions of these fears are justified, gigantic commercial and cultural forces unleashed in the last decade mean that Canutish resistance to the digitisation of large swathes of academic culture is futile.2004, James E. Force, Sarah Hutton, Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, page 31
    • […] the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act's Canutish attempt to stem the tide with its quota system […]2007, Keith Williams, H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies, page 19

Forms of Canutish

comparativemore Canutish
superlativemost Canutish

Origin of Canutish

From Canute + -ish, referring to the legend of King Canute and the waves.

Questions about Canutish

What does Canutish mean?
Canutish means futilely attempting to stop the unstoppable.
What part of speech is Canutish?
Canutish is an adjective.

Words near Canutish in the dictionary

  1. Canupp
  2. Canupps
  3. Canups
  4. Canute
  5. Canutian
  6. Canutish
  7. Canutism
  8. Canuto
  9. Canutos
  10. Canuxploitation
  11. canvas

Source and license

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