folk devil
folk devil noun: a person or type of person blamed by the public for various ills, as during a moral panic.
Noun
folk devil (plural folk devils)
- A person or type of person blamed by the public for various ills, as during a moral panic.
- It may be true, as Fred Robinson, a senior researcher at Newcastle University said, "Many people view Mrs. Thatcher as a kind of folk devil.1987 July 9, Steve Lohr, “Newcastle Journal: Half of England where jobs are as rare as Tories”, in New York Times, retrieved 27 Feb 2009
- "Every time things become problematic we start careering towards social causes and pick on a folk devil to attribute all evil."1996 December 18, Robert Verkaik, “‘Crash’ tackling”, in The Independent (UK), retrieved 08 Jun 2014
- Synonyms:
- scapegoat
Synonyms of folk devil
Forms of folk devil
| plural | folk devils |
|---|
Questions about folk devil
- What does folk devil mean?
- Folk devil means a person or type of person blamed by the public for various ills, as during a moral panic.
- What part of speech is folk devil?
- Folk devil is a noun.
- What is the plural of folk devil?
- The plural of folk devil is folk devils.
Words near folk devil in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: folk devil (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-folk devil.ogg.
Cite this entry: “folk devil.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/folk_devil. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.