Word.ws English Dictionary

moral panic

moral panic noun: a semi-spontaneous or media-generated mass movement based on the perception that an individual, group, community, or culture is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society; a public outcry.

Noun

moral panic (plural moral panics)

  1. A semi-spontaneous or media-generated mass movement based on the perception that an individual, group, community, or culture is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society; a public outcry.
    • The psychotherapist Marty Klein likens the current moral panic around online porn to the epidemics of fear and suspicion that sprung up around satanic cults in the 1980s, and even around comic books in the 1950s.2016 July 2, Sophie Gilbert, “Is Moral Panic About Online Porn Misplaced?”, in The Atlantic
    • But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was.2021 June 17, Moira Donegan, “What the moral panic about ‘critical race theory’ is about”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
    Synonyms:
    social panic

Examples of moral panic in a sentence

  • Moral panics have existed since well before the Salem witch trials — perhaps the paradigm case.2023 June 29, Pamela Paul, “Do Not Panic. It’s Just a Moral Panic.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
  • Moral panics, accompanied by calls for a return to a simpler age, once greeted the advent of frightening “new technologies” such as telephones and trains.2024 May 21, Matthew Reisz, “Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Foster review – the past isn’t a foreign place”...
  • It may come as some relief to hear, then, that for every alarmist headline there are plenty of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers who believe this moral panic is unfounded.2025 January 29, Amy Fleming, “All in the mind? The surprising truth about brain rot”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Synonyms of moral panic

  • social panic

Forms of moral panic

pluralmoral panics

Origin of moral panic

Modern usage appears to originate with Jock Young in 1971 and Stanley Cohen in 1972. Cohen states that "[they] both probably picked it up from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media".

Questions about moral panic

What does moral panic mean?
Moral panic means a semi-spontaneous or media-generated mass movement based on the perception that an individual, group, community, or culture is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society; a public outcry.
How do you use moral panic in a sentence?
Moral panics have existed since well before the Salem witch trials — perhaps the paradigm case.
What part of speech is moral panic?
Moral panic is a noun.
What is the plural of moral panic?
The plural of moral panic is moral panics.

Words near moral panic in the dictionary

  1. moral obligations
  2. moral of the story
  3. moral order
  4. moral orders
  5. moral outbidding
  6. moral panic
  7. moral panics
  8. moral philosophies
  9. moral philosophy
  10. moral police
  11. moral policed

Source and license

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