purity spiral
purity spiral noun: the situation in which members of an ideological group become increasingly zealous and intolerant, eventually turning on other members.
Noun
purity spiral (plural purity spirals)
- The situation in which members of an ideological group become increasingly zealous and intolerant, eventually turning on other members.
- [T]he American right has been caught in a purity spiral — a form of vicious circle in which successive elites compete among each other over who is the “true conservative.”2016, Matthew Sheffield, Rise of the alt-right: How mainstream conservatives' obsession with purity fueled a new right-wing radicalism
- This institutional slant has become most pronounced in universities, which have for several years gone through a 'purity spiral' as conservatives left the field, culminating in a sort of collective meltdown in the mid-2010s.2020, Ed West, Small Men on the Wrong Side of History
Forms of purity spiral
| plural | purity spirals |
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Origin of purity spiral
Used by sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning.
Questions about purity spiral
- What does purity spiral mean?
- Purity spiral means the situation in which members of an ideological group become increasingly zealous and intolerant, eventually turning on other members.
- What part of speech is purity spiral?
- Purity spiral is a noun.
- What is the plural of purity spiral?
- The plural of purity spiral is purity spirals.
Words near purity spiral in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: purity spiral (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: “purity spiral.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/purity_spiral. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.