masscult
masscult noun: the modern industrial equivalent of culture, mass-produced and anonymously consumed, without specialization or connoisseurship.
Noun
masscult (uncountable)
- The modern industrial equivalent of culture, mass-produced and anonymously consumed, without specialization or connoisseurship.
- In a famous 1960 essay, Macdonald identified three sorts of cultures: High Culture (think Cezanne and Eliot), which articulates an artist's idiosyncratic and often demanding vision; Masscult (Norman Rockwell and Erle Stanley Gardner), which tries “to please the crowd by any means,” and Midcult...1996 September 22, Michiko Kakutani, “The Trickle-Down Theory”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
- ★ THE BAD PLUS (Tomorrow) With its fifth studio album, “Prog” (Do the Math), this trio ventures further along a distinctive and adventurous path; the bassist Reid Anderson, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the drummer David King sound as committed as ever, and their alchemy of masscult allusions and...2007 June 29, The New York Times, “Jazz Listings”, in New York Times
Origin of masscult
From mass + cult, coined by Dwight Macdonald in the essay Masscult and Midcult (1960).
Questions about masscult
- What does masscult mean?
- Masscult means the modern industrial equivalent of culture, mass-produced and anonymously consumed, without specialization or connoisseurship.
- What part of speech is masscult?
- Masscult is a noun.
Words near masscult in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: masscult (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: “masscult.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/masscult. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.