Word.ws English Dictionary

lanyardism

lanyardism noun: the philosophy or sphere of civil servants, viewed as excessively liberal and officious.

Noun

lanyardism (uncountable)

  1. (UK, derogatory) The philosophy or sphere of civil servants, viewed as excessively liberal and officious.
    • This, named for the ubiquitous uniform of its proponents, is lanyardism.2025 May 27, Madeline Grant, “The Foreign Office is now a national embarrassment”, in The Telegraph
    • Layers and layers of governance and control and inefficiency and joyless lanyardism wasting time and money, commissioning reports, milking the taxpayer and the energetic dry, sitting on and squashing our still lingering culture of association and unofficial voluntarism, of clubs and committees, of...2025 June 5, Nicholas Boys Smith, “Oval's books go up in bureaucracy”, in The Critic

Origin of lanyardism

From lanyard + -ism.

Questions about lanyardism

What does lanyardism mean?
Lanyardism means the philosophy or sphere of civil servants, viewed as excessively liberal and officious.
What part of speech is lanyardism?
Lanyardism is a noun.

Words near lanyardism in the dictionary

  1. lanyaps
  2. lanyard
  3. lanyard class
  4. lanyard classes
  5. lanyarded
  6. lanyardism
  7. lanyards
  8. lanyer
  9. lanyers
  10. Lanyon
  11. Lanyons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lanyardism (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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