Word.ws English Dictionary

figurism

figurism noun: an intellectual movement of Jesuit missionaries at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, whose participants viewed the I Ching as a prophetic book containing the mysteries of Christianity, and prioritized working with the Qing Emperor (rather than with the Chinese literati) as a way of promoting Christianity in China.

Noun

figurism (uncountable)

  1. (historical) An intellectual movement of Jesuit missionaries at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, whose participants viewed the I Ching as a prophetic book containing the mysteries of Christianity, and prioritized working with the Qing Emperor (rather than with the Chinese literati) as a way of promoting Christianity in China.

Origin of figurism

From figure + -ism.

Questions about figurism

What does figurism mean?
Figurism means an intellectual movement of Jesuit missionaries at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, whose participants viewed the I Ching as a prophetic book containing the mysteries of Christianity, and prioritized working with the Qing Emperor (rather than with the Chinese literati) as a way of promoting Christianity in China.
What part of speech is figurism?
Figurism is a noun.

Words near figurism in the dictionary

  1. figuring on
  2. figuring out
  3. figuring up
  4. figurings
  5. figurings out
  6. figurism
  7. figurist
  8. figurists
  9. figurize
  10. figurized
  11. figurizes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: figurism (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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