Word.ws English Dictionary

humanewashing

humanewashing noun: the animal welfare analogue of greenwashing. Also the present participle and gerund of humanewash.

Noun

humanewashing (uncountable)

  1. The animal welfare analogue of greenwashing.
    • Now, a new report from the anti-factory farming group Farm Forward seeks to outline the differences between independent and industry animal welfare labels and expose what it calls “humanewashing” among both types of groups. Like the now widely recognized practice of “greenwashing,” Farm Forward...2021 January 19, Lisa Held, “Are Some Animal Welfare Labels 'Humanewashing'?”, in Civil Eats, retrieved 13 Sep 2021

Also used as

humanewashing is also the present participle and gerund of humanewash.

Origin of humanewashing

From humane + -wash + -ing, following the established pattern of greenwashing, pinkwashing, purplewashing, and similar forms (which came ultimately from the figurative-extension sense of whitewashing as "slapping a paintjob over the truth to hide it and to give a specious nice appearance").

Questions about humanewashing

What does humanewashing mean?
Humanewashing means the animal welfare analogue of greenwashing.
What part of speech is humanewashing?
Humanewashing is a noun.

Words near humanewashing in the dictionary

  1. humanesque
  2. humanest
  3. humanewash
  4. humanewashed
  5. humanewashes
  6. humanewashing
  7. humanflesh
  8. humanfree
  9. humanhood
  10. humaniac
  11. humaniacs

Source and license

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