Word.ws English Dictionary

heightism

heightism noun: a prejudiced attitude about human height that often results in discrimination, based on the belief that unusually short or tall people are inferior and undesirable.

Noun

heightism (uncountable)

  1. (informal) A prejudiced attitude about human height that often results in discrimination, based on the belief that unusually short or tall people are inferior and undesirable.
    • It is obvious that the dimensions of inequality could be extended to include a great many differences such as heightism where people who are taller are superior to people who are shorter, and so forth.1976, Robert Marsh Kloss, Ron E. Roberts, Dean S. Dorn, Sociology with a Human Face: Sociology as If People Mattered
    • There might be reinforcement of already harmful social evils such as heightism and racism.2001, James C. Peterson, Genetic Turning Points: The Ethics of Human Genetic Intervention

Origin of heightism

From height + -ism.

Questions about heightism

What does heightism mean?
Heightism means a prejudiced attitude about human height that often results in discrimination, based on the belief that unusually short or tall people are inferior and undesirable.
What part of speech is heightism?
Heightism is a noun.

Words near heightism in the dictionary

  1. heightflation
  2. heighth
  3. heighthon
  4. heighthons
  5. heighths
  6. heightism
  7. heightist
  8. heightists
  9. heightless
  10. heightmap
  11. heightmaps

Source and license

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