Word.ws English Dictionary

neo-noir

neo-noir noun: a genre of film that combines elements of traditional film noir with modern themes and visuals.

Noun

neo-noir (countable and uncountable, plural neo-noirs)

  1. (uncountable) A genre of film that combines elements of traditional film noir with modern themes and visuals.
    • By the time Martin Scorsese filmed "Taxi Driver," in the mid-70's, the neo-noir palette relied heavily on trash, crumbling streets, burned-out buildings, and many-splendored scuzz. The fedoras disappeared, too.1994, William Grimes, “Days and Nights of Murder, Madness and Mayhem”, in New York Times
    • In only one other neo-noir film, Chinatown, a big-studio, big-stars production, has the screenwriter actually won the Academy Award.2006, Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City
  2. (countable) An individual film of this kind.
    • Typical of neo-noir as a whole, British neo-noirs are highly intertextual and allusive […]2007, Andrew Spicer, European Film Noir

Forms of neo-noir

pluralneo-noirs

Origin of neo-noir

From neo- + noir, after film noir.

Questions about neo-noir

What does neo-noir mean?
Neo-noir means a genre of film that combines elements of traditional film noir with modern themes and visuals.
What part of speech is neo-noir?
Neo-noir is a noun.
What is the plural of neo-noir?
The plural of neo-noir is neo-noirs.

Words near neo-noir in the dictionary

  1. neo-Nazis
  2. neo-nazism
  3. neo-nazisms
  4. neo-nazist
  5. neo-nazists
  6. neo-noir
  7. neo-noirs
  8. neo-objectivism
  9. neo-Objectivist
  10. neo-Objectivists
  11. Neo-orthodox

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: neo-noir (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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