Word.ws English Dictionary

possessionism

possessionism noun: the tendency to expand one's ownership of property without regard for its ethical implications.

Noun

possessionism (uncountable)

  1. The tendency to expand one's ownership of property without regard for its ethical implications.
    • The Pastorals are defending Pauline incarnational christology against Jewish Christian myths justifying possessionism1995, M. D. Goulder, St. Paul Versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions, page 119
    • Possessionism in wreck diving regard can be characterized generally as the compulsive collection of artifacts1998, Gary Gentile, The Lusitania Controversies: Atrocity of War and a Wreck-Diving History, page 222

Examples of possessionism in a sentence

  • They're always viewed in relation to American suburbanism, possessionism, commodityism, or copism.2009, Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, page 370:
  • […] racial theories and the unprecedented increase in colonial expansionism and territorial possessionism, as exemplified by Britain's “imperial century,” […]2014, John Ernest, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative:

Origin of possessionism

From possession + -ism.

Questions about possessionism

What does possessionism mean?
Possessionism means the tendency to expand one's ownership of property without regard for its ethical implications.
How do you use possessionism in a sentence?
They're always viewed in relation to American suburbanism, possessionism, commodityism, or copism.
What part of speech is possessionism?
Possessionism is a noun.

Words near possessionism in the dictionary

  1. Possessione Vegra
  2. possessioned
  3. possessioner
  4. possessioners
  5. possessioning
  6. possessionism
  7. possessionist
  8. possessionistic
  9. possessionists
  10. possessionless
  11. possessionlessness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: possessionism (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: “possessionism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/possessionism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.