Word.ws English Dictionary

popularist

popularist adjective: reflecting popular taste and opinion.

Adjective

popularist (comparative more popularist, superlative most popularist)

  1. Reflecting popular taste and opinion.
    • There have been others, of course, antagonistic to established authority, whose philosophy has been anything but popularist, but it is not the popularist basis of Benn's antiauthoritarianism that is peculiar.1974, The Tablet - Volume 228, page 595
    • They based their honour killings on a hadith which used the Arabic word for honour in a word play which gave the reader a choice – to favour the more popularist and customary notion of male control over women or to follow the more pro-woman emancipatory approach which gave women control over their...2011, Christina Jones-Pauly, Abir Dajani Tuqan, Women Under Islam: Gender Justice and the Politics of Islamic Law

Noun

popularist (plural popularists)

  1. An artist or composer whose work appeals to popular tastes.
    • Three composers in the study are undoubted popularists.1954, Dennison Nash, The American Composer: A Study in Social-psychology
    • Blitzstein discerns a pervasive debt to impressionism among these folkloric primitivists, and he refers at times to Bloch explicitly as a “post-impressionist” (whereas he sometimes places Copland among the popularists)2012, Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World, page 120
  2. One who adapts and popularizes a subject.
    • Here, she has no greater debt than to Sylvester Graham, originally a New Jersey minister who found a more successful calling as the popularist of what his magnum opus summarily entitled The New Science of Human Life.2011, James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics, page 227
    • Did Alan Watts (1915–1973), one of the first Western popularists of Zen, have it right when he described Zen Art as the “art of artlessness, the art of controlled accident” (Watts 1994)?2012, Inken Prohl, John K. Nelson, Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Religions, page 529
  3. On who advocates populism.
    • The so-called 'popularists' attempted to exploit the urge of the masses of the Western Ukrainian lands for enlightenment and cultural education in their native tongue in order to strengthen the dominant position of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie.1986, I͡U︡riĭ I͡U︡rʹevich Kondufor, A Short History of the Ukraine, page 126
    • In their view the 'nascent leader' is a transient type which will develop into either a 'leader' or 'popularist'.1987, Michael Salamon, Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice, page 168
  4. One who explains social phenomena in terms of popular responses and habits.
    • Despite the paucity of early psychological research on the consequences of job transfers, popularists have been quick to point to the negative consequences of transfer: heart attacks in men, depression in women, maladjustment in children.2012, Adrian Furnham, The Psychology of Behaviour at Work: The Individual in the Organization
    • Traditionalists see only campaigns launched to recover Jerusalem as true crusades; generalists argue that any Christian war fought for God was a crusade; popularists claim that crusading came out of popular, peasant movements; while pluralists argue that any war in which the participants took a vow...2012, Kathryn Hurlock, Britain, Ireland and the Crusades, C.1000-1300, page 91

Examples of popularist in a sentence

  • The 'Love Boat' was popularist, light entertainment but the impact was significant (Schwichtenberg, 1984).2013, Tihomir Lukovic, Nautical Tourism, page 95:
  • The rise of the popularist approach reshaped the shared assumptions and agreed procedure of learning during the 17th century.2018, Xiufeng Liu, Wen Ma, Confucianism Reconsidered:
  • By and large, the popularists were courted by, and often allied themselves, with the guerrillas.1995, Peter R. Baehr, Human Rights in Developing Countries Yearbook, page 22:

Forms of popularist

Adjective
comparativemore popularist
superlativemost popularist
Noun
pluralpopularists

Origin of popularist

From popular + -ist.

Questions about popularist

What does popularist mean?
Popularist means reflecting popular taste and opinion.
How do you use popularist in a sentence?
The 'Love Boat' was popularist, light entertainment but the impact was significant (Schwichtenberg, 1984).
What part of speech is popularist?
Popularist can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near popularist in the dictionary

  1. populariser
  2. popularisers
  3. popularises
  4. popularising
  5. popularism
  6. popularist
  7. popularists
  8. popularities
  9. popularity
  10. popularity contest
  11. popularity contests

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: popularist (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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