Word.ws English Dictionary

nimbyism

nimbyism noun: the ideology of a nimby.

Noun (1)

nimbyism (countable and uncountable, plural nimbyisms)

  1. (derogatory) The ideology of a nimby.
    • Are the objections to the airport legitimate or is it just a case of nimbyism?
    • All this has led to an explosion of protest across China, including among a middle class that has discovered nimbyism.2013 August 10, “Can China clean up fast enough?”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848, archived from the original on 09 Mar 2023

Noun (2) capitalized: NIMBYism

NIMBYism (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of nimbyism.
    • And in the case of New York, NIMBYism is ultimately the reason a great global city has become a one-industry town, leaving it unusually vulnerable to pandemic-driven economic dislocations.2022 January 18, Paul Krugman, “Why a Blue City Is Feeling the Blues”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 01 Mar 2022
    • NIMBY stands for “Not in my backyard,” an acronym that proliferated in the early 1980s to describe neighbors who fight nearby development, especially anything involving apartments. The word was initially descriptive (the Oxford English Dictionary added “NIMBY” in 1989 and has since tacked on...2022 June 5, Conor Dougherty, “Twilight of the NIMBY”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 10 Jun 2022

Noun (3) capitalized: Nimbyism

Nimbyism (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of nimbyism.
    • Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism.2019 May 22, Farhad Manjoo, “America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 01 Jun 2019

Forms of nimbyism

pluralnimbyisms
alternative formNIMBYism
alternative formNimbyism

Origin of nimbyism

From nimby + -ism.

From NIMBY + -ism.

Questions about nimbyism

What does nimbyism mean?
Nimbyism means the ideology of a nimby.
What part of speech is nimbyism?
Nimbyism is a noun.
What is the plural of nimbyism?
The plural of nimbyism is nimbyisms.

Words near nimbyism in the dictionary

  1. nimbused
  2. nimbuses
  3. nimbuslike
  4. nimby
  5. nimbyish
  6. nimbyism
  7. nimbyisms
  8. nimbyist
  9. nimbyists
  10. nimbys
  11. NIMC

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nimbyism (page history and authors); NIMBYism (page history and authors); Nimbyism (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: “nimbyism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nimbyism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.