Word.ws English Dictionary

presentist

presentist adjective: of or pertaining to presentism; viewing the past with a perspective limited to present-day attitudes and beliefs.

Adjective

presentist (comparative more presentist, superlative most presentist)

  1. Of or pertaining to presentism; viewing the past with a perspective limited to present-day attitudes and beliefs.
    • Many people lost their perspective in their euphoria and became parochial and presentist.2004, Barry Wellman, Bernie Hogan, “The Immanent Internet”, in Johnston McKay, editor, Netting Citizens: Exploring Citizenship in a Digital Age, Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, pages 54–80
    • To read him as defensively fashioning what we now call a "black identity" is presentist.2009 December 14, John McWhorter, “The Entertainer: Louis Armstrong's Underrated Legacy”, in The New Yorker, page 89

Noun

presentist (plural presentists)

  1. A follower of presentism.

Examples of presentist in a sentence

  • Another is to combat the presentist bias that harms our ability to see clearly today.2018 January 1, Conor Friedersdorf, “Exploring 1968 and the Making of Modern America”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 01...
  • While purportedly forward-looking, this approach is profoundly presentist and placeless.2018, Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 70:

Forms of presentist

Adjective
comparativemore presentist
superlativemost presentist
Noun
pluralpresentists

Origin of presentist

From present + -ist.

Words formed from presentist

Questions about presentist

What does presentist mean?
Presentist means of or pertaining to presentism; viewing the past with a perspective limited to present-day attitudes and beliefs.
How do you use presentist in a sentence?
Another is to combat the presentist bias that harms our ability to see clearly today.
What part of speech is presentist?
Presentist can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near presentist in the dictionary

  1. presenting problems
  2. presention
  3. presentions
  4. presentism
  5. presentisms
  6. presentist
  7. presentists
  8. presentities
  9. presentity
  10. presentive
  11. presentively

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: presentist (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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