Word.ws English Dictionary

communitas

communitas noun: an unstructured community of common experience.

Noun

communitas (countable and uncountable, plural communitates)

  1. An unstructured community of common experience.
    • Monastic life, pilgrimage, bonds of friendship formed among the group of young initiates, contemporary teenage counter-culture movements are all good examples of communitates.2012, Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film, →ISBN, pages 17–18
  2. The very spirit of community; an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness.
    • A sense of harmony with the universe is made evident and the whole planet is felt to be communitas.1986, Victor W. Turner, The Anthropology of Experience, University of Illinois Press, page 43
    • The achievement of communitas is the pilgrim's fundamental motivation.1986, Victor W. Turner, Contesting the Sacred, Routledge, published 1991

Forms of communitas

pluralcommunitates

Origin of communitas

Unadapted borrowing from Latin commūnitās. Doublet of community.

Questions about communitas

What does communitas mean?
Communitas means an unstructured community of common experience.
What part of speech is communitas?
Communitas is a noun.
What is the plural of communitas?
The plural of communitas is communitates.

Words near communitas in the dictionary

  1. communitarianism
  2. communitarianisms
  3. communitarianist
  4. communitarianists
  5. communitarians
  6. communitas
  7. communitates
  8. communitie
  9. communities
  10. communities of practice
  11. communitive

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: communitas (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:

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