Word.ws English Dictionary

cultural cringe

cultural cringe noun: in Australia, a formerly widespread belief that Australian cultural works, especially in literature and the arts, were inferior to those produced in Britain and Europe.

Noun

cultural cringe (uncountable)

  1. In Australia, a formerly widespread belief that Australian cultural works, especially in literature and the arts, were inferior to those produced in Britain and Europe.
    • Prior to the 1980s, Australian English had been widely deprecated by Australians themselves, principally as a result of a sense of inferiority known as "cultural cringe".2012, James Lambert, “Beyond Hobson-Jobson: A new lexicography for Indian English”, in World Englishes, page 295

Questions about cultural cringe

What does cultural cringe mean?
Cultural cringe means in Australia, a formerly widespread belief that Australian cultural works, especially in literature and the arts, were inferior to those produced in Britain and Europe.
What part of speech is cultural cringe?
Cultural cringe is a noun.

Words near cultural cringe in the dictionary

  1. cultural centers
  2. cultural centre
  3. cultural centres
  4. cultural Christian
  5. cultural Christians
  6. cultural cringe
  7. cultural diffusion
  8. cultural diffusions
  9. cultural divide
  10. cultural divides
  11. cultural ecology

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cultural cringe (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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