Word.ws English Dictionary

idiotism

idiotism noun: very severe mental retardation.

Noun (1)

idiotism (countable and uncountable, plural idiotisms)

  1. (historical) Very severe mental retardation.
    • He did not perceive that regal power, in a few generations, introduces idiotism into the noble stem […]1791 (date written), Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], published 1792, →OCLC
    • Idiotism had long been accepted as hopeless: ‘Absolute idiocy admits of no cure,’ noted the nineteenth-century psychiatrist George Man Burrows (1771–1846).1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 488
  2. A foolish utterance.
    • […] that clear soprano, in nursery, rings out a shower of innocent idiotisms over the half-stripped baby, and suspends the bawl upon its lips.1863, Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard

Noun (2)

idiotism (plural idiotisms)

  1. Idiom.
  2. An overly literal translation of an idiom.

Forms of idiotism

pluralidiotisms

Origin of idiotism

From idiot + -ism.

From Latin idiotismus.

Questions about idiotism

What does idiotism mean?
Idiotism means very severe mental retardation.
What part of speech is idiotism?
Idiotism is a noun.
What is the plural of idiotism?
The plural of idiotism is idiotisms.

Words near idiotism in the dictionary

  1. idioticness
  2. idioticon
  3. idioticons
  4. idioticy
  5. idiotish
  6. idiotism
  7. idiotisms
  8. idiotist
  9. idiotistic
  10. idiotists
  11. idiotize

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: idiotism (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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