nanny state
nanny state noun: a state whose government institutions are authoritative and over-paternalistic, interfering with and controlling people's lives.
Noun
nanny state (plural nanny states)
- A state whose government institutions are authoritative and over-paternalistic, interfering with and controlling people's lives.
- Scapegoating an impotent government (running around to clean up the messes made by its business friends) arises from bad faith, from a continuing hostility to the Nanny State that nevertheless goes alongside a refusal to accept the consequences of the sidelining of government in global capitalism...2009, Mark Fisher, chapter 8, in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books, →ISBN, page 63
Antonyms of nanny state
Forms of nanny state
| plural | nanny states |
|---|
Origin of nanny state
Of British origin.
Words formed from nanny state
- nanny stater
Questions about nanny state
- What does nanny state mean?
- Nanny state means a state whose government institutions are authoritative and over-paternalistic, interfering with and controlling people's lives.
- What part of speech is nanny state?
- Nanny state is a noun.
- What is the plural of nanny state?
- The plural of nanny state is nanny states.
Words near nanny state in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: nanny state (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: “nanny state.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nanny_state. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.