Word.ws English Dictionary

disanthropy

Syllables: dis·an·thro·py/dɪsˈænθɹəpi/

disanthropy noun: a misanthropic desire for a world without human life, expressed in literature.

Noun

disanthropy (usually uncountable, plural disanthropies)

  1. (usually, literary criticism) A misanthropic desire for a world without human life, expressed in literature.
    • [pages 40–41] D. H. Lawrence, enthused and infuriated by [Friedrich] Nietzsche, entrusted to his alter ego Birkin in Women in Love a desire that I will call "disanthropy": […] Lawrence may have yearned for a world without people, but it was Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse that first explored...2012, Greg Garrard, “Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy”, in Ranjan Ghosh, editor, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism: Issue 127: Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of...
    • Disanthropy is the imagination of the world without humans, inspired by the resurgence of millennial Christianity in the eighteenth century and the discovery of 'deep time' following the publication of [Charles] Lyell's Principles of Geology[…].2018, Astrid Bracke, “Ecocriticism and Jim Crace’s Early Novels”, in Katy Shaw, Kate Aughterson, editors, Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan; Springer Nature, →DOI...

Forms of disanthropy

pluraldisanthropies

Origin of disanthropy

PIE word *dwís From dis- (prefix meaning ‘against; not’) + -anthropy (suffix meaning ‘humanity’), modelled after misanthropy. The word was coined by the Canadian literary critic Greg Garrard in a 2012 article published in SubStance: see the quotation.

Words formed from disanthropy

Questions about disanthropy

What does disanthropy mean?
Disanthropy means a misanthropic desire for a world without human life, expressed in literature.
What part of speech is disanthropy?
Disanthropy is a noun.
How do you pronounce disanthropy?
Disanthropy is pronounced /dɪsˈænθɹəpi/ (UK).
What is the plural of disanthropy?
The plural of disanthropy is disanthropies.

Words near disanthropy in the dictionary

  1. disanointed
  2. disanointing
  3. disanoints
  4. disanthropic
  5. disanthropies
  6. disanthropy
  7. DiSantis
  8. DiSanto
  9. DiSantos
  10. disapointed
  11. disaposin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: disanthropy (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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