Word.ws English Dictionary

no wave

no wave noun: a broad musical and artistic movement originating in the mid-1970s in New York City, typified by experimentation and performance art.

Noun

no wave (uncountable)

  1. A broad musical and artistic movement originating in the mid-1970s in New York City, typified by experimentation and performance art.
    • To dream that tall, mean, vegan Jeff, in turtlenecks and chinos like Sterling Morrison, was the only one I talked to at all the no wave shows I went to alone.2020, “Jinx”, in Timmy's Unbuttoned Gen X Meditations, performed by Good Fuck

Origin of no wave

A punning rejection of the more commercial new wave movement.

Questions about no wave

What does no wave mean?
No wave means a broad musical and artistic movement originating in the mid-1970s in New York City, typified by experimentation and performance art.
What part of speech is no wave?
No wave is a noun.

Words near no wave in the dictionary

  1. no true Scotsman fallacy
  2. no trump
  3. no trumps
  4. no two ways about it
  5. no use
  6. no wave
  7. no way
  8. no way Jose
  9. no way José
  10. no way to treat a lady
  11. no way, Jose

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: no 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “no wave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/no_wave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.