Word.ws English Dictionary

collapsitarian

collapsitarian noun: a person who desires or predicts a social or economic collapse.

Noun

collapsitarian (plural collapsitarians)

  1. A person who desires or predicts a social or economic collapse.
    • Kunstler resists the doomer label—“I’ve never been a complete collapsitarian,” he says—but the fact that one of his bombs detonates in Washington on “twelve twenty-one” is likely to please superstitious adherents of the Maya calendar, which concludes its first cycle on what is now the Internet’s...2009, Ben McGrath, “The Dystopians”, in The New Yorker
    • According to several self-styled collapsitarians, the world now faces a century of declines, the long emergency, environmental collapse, or peak everything.2014, Tyler Priest, “Hubbert’s Peak: The Great Debate over the End of Oil”, in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, volume 44, number 1, →DOI, page 38

Adjective

collapsitarian (comparative more collapsitarian, superlative most collapsitarian)

  1. Desiring social or economic collapse.
    • Nowhere in the course of this collapsitarian spiel did there seem to be more than a cursory acknowledgment of the misery of mass unemployment and the vertigo that would befall a nation deprived of the foundations of its economy and cultural identity.2009, Virginia Heffernan, “Apocalypse Ciao: Let the End Times Roll”, in Mother Jones
    • The Dark Mountain project offends a lot of people. It gets called defeatist, misanthropic, “collapsitarian.” But surely there is something in the air (and in the soil, and the ocean) these days.2014, David Tompkins, “Weird Ecology: On The Southern Reach Trilogy”, in Los Angeles Review of Books
  2. Of or pertaining to collapsitarianism.

Forms of collapsitarian

Noun
pluralcollapsitarians
Adjective
comparativemore collapsitarian
superlativemost collapsitarian

Origin of collapsitarian

From collapse + -itarian.

Questions about collapsitarian

What does collapsitarian mean?
Collapsitarian means a person who desires or predicts a social or economic collapse.
What part of speech is collapsitarian?
Collapsitarian can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of collapsitarian?
The plural of collapsitarian is collapsitarians.

Words near collapsitarian in the dictionary

  1. collapsing
  2. collapsins
  3. collapsion
  4. collapsions
  5. collapsism
  6. collapsitarian
  7. collapsitarianism
  8. collapsitarians
  9. collapsium
  10. collapsogram
  11. collapsograms

Source and license

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