Word.ws English Dictionary

great man theory

great man theory noun: a theory of history that sees it as driven by the actions of powerful individuals.

Noun

great man theory

  1. A theory of history that sees it as driven by the actions of powerful individuals.
    • The number of biographies in the list does not surprise Greer because he detects an implicit “great man” theory of history in the canon.2024 August 31, John Naughton, “Can you judge the tech bros by their bookshelves?”, in The Observer, →ISSN

Questions about great man theory

What does great man theory mean?
Great man theory means a theory of history that sees it as driven by the actions of powerful individuals.
What part of speech is great man theory?
Great man theory is a noun.

Words near great man theory in the dictionary

  1. Great Lent
  2. Great Longstone
  3. Great Lumley
  4. Great Mackerel Beach
  5. Great Malvern
  6. great man theory
  7. Great Marlow
  8. great martyr
  9. great martyress
  10. great martyresses
  11. great martyrs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: great man theory (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: “great man theory.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/great_man_theory. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.