Word.ws English Dictionary

cultural appropriation

US/ˈkʌlt͡ʃ(ə)ɹəl əˌpɹoʊpɹiˈeɪʃən/

cultural appropriation noun: the (often financially) exploitative, oppressive and/or inaccurate cooption of elements of one culture by members of a different culture, often of those which have a history of stigmatisation.

cultural appropriation: the (often financially) exploitative, oppressive and/or inaccurate cooption of elements of one...
Image: Support Tattoos and Piercings at Work, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

cultural appropriation (countable and uncountable, plural cultural appropriations)

  1. The (often financially) exploitative, oppressive and/or inaccurate cooption of elements of one culture by members of a different culture, often of those which have a history of stigmatisation.
    • White Americans engaged in cultural appropriation when they performed dances involving blackface and mock Native American regalia.
    • What are the implications for our understanding of the ethics of cultural appropriation when the sound of a Pacific island women's choir becomes the hook of a club hit in Europe, without reward, recompense, or credit for that choir?2000, David Hesmondhalgh, in Born/Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others, p. 280

cultural appropriation meaning in Arabic

cultural appropriation in Arabic

exploitative, oppressive and/or inaccurate cooption of elements of one culture by members of a different culture
استيلاء ثقافي

Examples of cultural appropriation in a sentence

  • Are yoga classes just bad cultural appropriation?2015, The Guardian, headline, 23 November:
  • Where, then, is the line that divides the simple pleasure of cultural fusion from cultural appropriation?2015 April 2, Navneet Alang, “Must We Forfeit Our Ghee?”, in Hazlitt, retrieved 14 May 2023:

Forms of cultural appropriation

pluralcultural appropriations

Words that rhyme with cultural appropriation

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about cultural appropriation

What does cultural appropriation mean?
Cultural appropriation means the (often financially) exploitative, oppressive and/or inaccurate cooption of elements of one culture by members of a different culture, often of those which have a history of stigmatisation.
What is cultural appropriation in Arabic?
Cultural appropriation in Arabic is استيلاء ثقافي. See Cultural appropriation meaning in Arabic.
How do you use cultural appropriation in a sentence?
Are yoga classes just bad cultural appropriation?
What part of speech is cultural appropriation?
Cultural appropriation is a noun.
How do you pronounce cultural appropriation?
Cultural appropriation is pronounced /ˈkʌlt͡ʃ(ə)ɹəl əˌpɹoʊpɹiˈeɪʃən/ (US).
What is the plural of cultural appropriation?
The plural of cultural appropriation is cultural appropriations.

Words near cultural appropriation in the dictionary

  1. culturagram
  2. culturagrams
  3. cultural
  4. cultural anthropologist
  5. cultural anthropology
  6. cultural appropriation
  7. cultural appropriations
  8. cultural appropriator
  9. cultural appropriators
  10. cultural arbitraries
  11. cultural arbitrary

Source and license

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