Word.ws English Dictionary

pact of silence

pact of silence noun: a tacit agreement not to discuss a certain topic.

Noun

pact of silence (plural pacts of silence)

  1. (idiomatic) A tacit agreement not to discuss a certain topic
    • From the late 1950s to the early 2000s there has been a Parsonian normative solidarity between the state and civil society actors, a pact of silence that guarded the extent of periodic race crimes during the Ottoman and Republican eras—that is, the Thrace events of the 1930s against Jews, the...2015, Ayda Erbal, “The Armenian Genocide, AKA the Elephant in the Room”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies, volume 47, number 4, →DOI, pages 783–790
    • The pact of silence refers to the tacit agreement that the divisive issues of the past should be removed from the public sphere (a sort of gag rule).2020, The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Politics, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 44

Forms of pact of silence

pluralpacts of silence
alternative formpact of forgetting

Questions about pact of silence

What does pact of silence mean?
Pact of silence means a tacit agreement not to discuss a certain topic.
What part of speech is pact of silence?
Pact of silence is a noun.
What is the plural of pact of silence?
The plural of pact of silence is pacts of silence.

Words near pact of silence in the dictionary

  1. pacritinib
  2. pacs
  3. pacsin
  4. pacsins
  5. pact
  6. pact of silence
  7. pacta de non petendo
  8. pacta sunt servanda
  9. pactamycin
  10. pactamycins
  11. pacted

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pact of silence (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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