Word.ws English Dictionary

folk devils

folk devils is the plural of folk devil.

Meaning of folk devil

Noun

folk devil (plural folk devils)

  1. (idiomatic) 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
    Synonyms:
    scapegoat

Questions about folk devils

What is folk devils the plural of?
Folk devils is the plural of folk devil.

Words near folk devils in the dictionary

  1. folk dancer
  2. folk dancers
  3. folk dances
  4. folk dancing
  5. folk devil
  6. folk devils
  7. folk etymologies
  8. folk etymologist
  9. folk etymologists
  10. folk etymologize
  11. folk etymologized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: folk devils (page history and authors); 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.

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Cite this entry: “folk devils.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/folk_devils. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.