Word.ws English Dictionary

new wave

new wave adjective: representing the latest and most advanced style.

Adjective

new wave (comparative more new wave, superlative most new wave)

  1. Representing the latest and most advanced style.
    • That girl is pretty wild now / The girl's a super freak / The kind of girl you read about / In new wave magazines1981 August, Rick James, Alonzo Miller, “Super Freak” (track 5), in Street Songs, performed by Rick James
    Synonyms:
    trendy, faddish

Noun (1)

new wave (uncountable)

  1. An alternative and broad pop and rock music genre that existed during the late 1970s and the early to mid-1980s, incorporating punk sensibilities and/or other forms of music, but made with more accessibility.
    • New York to east California / There's a new wave coming, I warn ya1981, “Kids in America”, performed by Kim Wilde

Noun (2) capitalized: New Wave

New Wave (uncountable)

  1. Any of several movements in music and film which are or were considered cutting edge.

Synonyms of new wave

Forms of new wave

comparativemore new wave
superlativemost new wave

Origin of new wave

Calque of French Nouvelle Vague.

Words formed from new wave

Questions about new wave

What does new wave mean?
New wave means representing the latest and most advanced style.
What part of speech is new wave?
New wave can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near new wave in the dictionary

  1. New Village
  2. New Vineyard
  3. New Virginia
  4. New Visayas
  5. New Washington
  6. new wave
  7. new waver
  8. new wavers
  9. new wavish
  10. New Weird
  11. New Weird America

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: new wave (page history and authors); New Wave (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: “new wave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/new_wave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.