gothic rock
gothic rock noun: a style of music that developed out of punk rock in the late 1970s, with lyrics and imagery often referring to morbid, spooky or mystical ideas.
Noun (1)
gothic rock (uncountable)
- A style of music that developed out of punk rock in the late 1970s, with lyrics and imagery often referring to morbid, spooky or mystical ideas.
- Since the 1980s, several goth substyles have mixed the Batcave heritage with other musical genres into new goth substyles. New wave was gothed into darkwave, classic rock into gothic rock, and metal into gothic metal.2015, Isabella van Elferen, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture, Routledge, →ISBN, page 25
- Synonyms:
- positive punk, gothic, goth
Noun (2) capitalized: Gothic rock
Gothic rock (uncountable)
- Alternative spelling of gothic rock.
Synonyms of gothic rock
Forms of gothic rock
| alternative form | Gothic rock |
|---|
Origin of gothic rock
First coined by John Stickney in reference to The Doors in 1967 and used by the late 1970s to describe the musical scene that gave rise to the goth subculture, both from a supposed aesthetic similarity to dark and moody 19th century gothic fiction and earlier gothic art and architecture.
Words formed from gothic rock
Questions about gothic rock
- What does gothic rock mean?
- Gothic rock means a style of music that developed out of punk rock in the late 1970s, with lyrics and imagery often referring to morbid, spooky or mystical ideas.
- What part of speech is gothic rock?
- Gothic rock is a noun.
Words near gothic rock in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: gothic rock (page history and authors); Gothic rock (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:
Cite this entry: “gothic rock.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gothic_rock. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.