Word.ws English Dictionary

fetichism

fetichism is the archaic form of fetishism.

Meaning of fetishism

Noun

fetishism (countable and uncountable, plural fetishisms)

  1. The belief that natural objects have supernatural powers, or that something created by people has power over people.
    • As for ethics, they are a product of the fetishism of class society and will vanish with it. The proletariat has no need of ethics, and the norms of behaviour that it creates in its own interest are technical in character.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume III: The Breakdown, Oxford: Clarendon Press, translation of Główne nurty marksizmu: rozkład (in...
  2. A form of paraphilia where the object of attraction is an inanimate object or a part of a person's body.
    • That's cross-dressing to you and me and, according to Blanchard and the APA, there are two types – fetishism and autogynephilia.2012 December 9, Paris Lees, “Transgender people get a status update”, in The Guardian
  3. An irrational, obsessive belief in the power of some object or action.

Forms of fetichism

pluralfetichisms

Origin of fetichism

From fetich + -ism.

Questions about fetichism

What is fetichism the archaic form of?
Fetichism is the archaic form of fetishism.

Words near fetichism in the dictionary

  1. fetiches
  2. fetichise
  3. fetichised
  4. fetichises
  5. fetichising
  6. fetichism
  7. fetichisms
  8. fetichist
  9. fetichistic
  10. fetichists
  11. fetichize

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fetichism (page history and authors); fetishism (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: “fetichism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fetichism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.