Word.ws English Dictionary

human-flesh search

human-flesh search noun: research at an Internet forum where questions may be posed for other people to answer.

Noun

human-flesh search (plural human-flesh searches)

  1. Research at an Internet forum where questions may be posed for other people to answer.
    • 3 March 2010, The New York Times, China's Cyberposse
      Mop had a forum called human-flesh search engine, where users could pose questions about entertainment trivia that other users would answer: a type of crowd-sourcing.
  2. Vigilante justice where Internet users collaborate to find people and punish them by public exposure, harassment, or intimidation.
    • 3 March 2010, The New York Times, China's Cyberposse
      Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath.

Forms of human-flesh search

pluralhuman-flesh searches

Origin of human-flesh search

Possibly a back-formation from human flesh search engine.

Questions about human-flesh search

What does human-flesh search mean?
Human-flesh search means research at an Internet forum where questions may be posed for other people to answer.
What part of speech is human-flesh search?
Human-flesh search is a noun.
What is the plural of human-flesh search?
The plural of human-flesh search is human-flesh searches.

Words near human-flesh search in the dictionary

  1. human years
  2. human zoo
  3. human zoos
  4. human-computer interaction
  5. human-dominated
  6. human-flesh search
  7. human-flesh searches
  8. human-free
  9. human-like
  10. human-made
  11. human-occupied vehicle

Source and license

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