Word.ws English Dictionary

panopticism

panopticism noun: the state or quality of being panoptic; all-seeingness.

Noun

panopticism (uncountable)

  1. The state or quality of being panoptic; all-seeingness.
    • I cannot help but follow such panopticism to its ultimate conclusion: a Nineteen Eighty-Four scenario.2008, Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, Routledge, →ISBN, page 69
    • The goal of police panopticism is to minimize the severe costs of managing the police by leveraging data-driven surveillance from multiple institutional points and actors.2012 March, Mary D. Fan, “Panopticism for Police: Structural Reform Bargaining and Police Regulation by Data-Driven Surveillance”, in Washington Law Review, volume 87, number 93, page 102

Origin of panopticism

From panoptic + -ism.

Questions about panopticism

What does panopticism mean?
Panopticism means the state or quality of being panoptic; all-seeingness.
What part of speech is panopticism?
Panopticism is a noun.

Words near panopticism in the dictionary

  1. panopsins
  2. panoptic
  3. panoptica
  4. panoptical
  5. panoptically
  6. panopticism
  7. panopticon
  8. panopticonic
  9. panopticons
  10. panoram
  11. panorama

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: panopticism (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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