Word.ws English Dictionary

privatism

privatism noun: concern with issues only insofar as they affect one as an individual; self-interest.

Noun

privatism (countable and uncountable, plural privatisms)

  1. Concern with issues only insofar as they affect one as an individual; self-interest.
    • Jane Austen's Emma (1816) illustrates the social novel's association of androgyny with selfish privatism.1990, Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 441
    • What Habermas describes as ‘family-vocational privatism’, which is similar to what Williams (1983) recognizes as ‘mobile privatism’, can be considered in terms of a category of ‘self-seeking privatism’ (Lodziak, 1996), which is pursued by those for whom capitalism ‘pays off’ in terms of status...2008, Richard Ronald, The Ideology of Home Ownership […] , Springer, →ISBN, page 66

Forms of privatism

pluralprivatisms

Origin of privatism

From private + -ism.

Questions about privatism

What does privatism mean?
Privatism means concern with issues only insofar as they affect one as an individual; self-interest.
What part of speech is privatism?
Privatism is a noun.
What is the plural of privatism?
The plural of privatism is privatisms.

Words near privatism in the dictionary

  1. privatised
  2. privatiser
  3. privatisers
  4. privatises
  5. privatising
  6. privatism
  7. privatisms
  8. privatissima
  9. privatissimum
  10. privatissimums
  11. privative

Source and license

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