Word.ws English Dictionary

homo ludens

homo ludens noun: the human being viewed as primarily concerned with play, seeing it as an aim in itself.

Noun (1)

homo ludens

  1. The human being viewed as primarily concerned with play, seeing it as an aim in itself.
    • To a homo ludens, playing is an aim in itself and justifies any effort. A real homo ludens does not fuse “ordinary life” with playing. He transforms “ordinary life” into something qualitatively different.1989, Yishai Tobin, editor, From Sign to Text: A semiotic view of communication, John Benjamins Publishing, →ISBN, page 196
    • The sandpit, mud, lollipop sticks, goo, plasticine, oozing clay and, later, petri dishes and test tubes: playing with such stuff, Hall argues, has clearly influenced the materialisations of contemporary art, so much of it three-dimensional, inherently transient and labile, and playful. Homo ludens...2000 April 13, Marina Warner, “A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque”, in London Review of Books, volume 22, number 08, →ISSN

Noun (2) capitalized: Homo ludens

Homo ludens

  1. Alternative letter-case form of homo ludens.

Examples of homo ludens in a sentence

  • It takes a homo ludens to eat the only fruit forbidden by God, unthinkingly and playfully.2001 [1999], Luciano Floridi, Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction, Routledge, →ISBN, page 221:
  • “Homo ludens has always had a talent for inventing jobs of the non-existential kind.2017 April 18, Philip Oltermann, quoting Jürgen Schmidhuber, “Jürgen Schmidhuber on the robot future: ‘They will pay as much attention to...

Forms of homo ludens

alternative formHomo ludens
alternative formHomo Ludens

Origin of homo ludens

Coined by Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1938), which introduces the concept, from Latin homō lūdēns (“playful man”).

Questions about homo ludens

What does homo ludens mean?
Homo ludens means the human being viewed as primarily concerned with play, seeing it as an aim in itself.
How do you use homo ludens in a sentence?
It takes a homo ludens to eat the only fruit forbidden by God, unthinkingly and playfully.
What part of speech is homo ludens?
Homo ludens is a noun.

Words near homo ludens in the dictionary

  1. homo Aristophaneus
  2. homo economicus
  3. homo faber
  4. Homo idioticus
  5. Homo insipiens
  6. homo ludens
  7. homo milk
  8. homo milks
  9. homo negronus
  10. homo negronus Americanus
  11. Homo novus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: homo ludens (page history and authors); Homo ludens (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: “homo ludens.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/homo_ludens. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.