Word.ws English Dictionary

deattribution

deattribution noun: discontinuance of attributing a work of art or literature, etc. to a particular creator, especially in a case where a work is reassigned from a prominent creator to a lesser or unknown creator.

Noun

deattribution (plural deattributions)

  1. Discontinuance of attributing a work of art or literature, etc. to a particular creator, especially in a case where a work is reassigned from a prominent creator to a lesser or unknown creator.
    • Deattribution of Rembrandt paintings has been going on among art historians for decades, constantly winnowing a corpus inflated by the 17th- and 18th-century practice of regarding many works simply in Rembrandt's style as "by the master."1986 September 30, Douglas C. McGill, “Met to Relabel 2 of Its ‘Rembrandts’”, in New York Times, retrieved 25 Sep 2015
    • Attributions, deattributions, and reattributions are often more easily made after reviewing x-radiographs, infrared reflectograms, dendrochronological data, and pigment analyses.2006, W. Stanley Taft Jr., James W. Mayer, The Science of Paintings, →ISBN, page 9

Forms of deattribution

pluraldeattributions
alternative formde-attribution

Origin of deattribution

From deattribute + -ion.

Questions about deattribution

What does deattribution mean?
Deattribution means discontinuance of attributing a work of art or literature, etc. to a particular creator, especially in a case where a work is reassigned from a prominent creator to a lesser or unknown creator.
What part of speech is deattribution?
Deattribution is a noun.
What is the plural of deattribution?
The plural of deattribution is deattributions.

Words near deattribution in the dictionary

  1. deattenuation
  2. deattribute
  3. deattributed
  4. deattributes
  5. deattributing
  6. deattribution
  7. deattributions
  8. deaurate
  9. deaurated
  10. deaurates
  11. deaurating

Source and license

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