Word.ws English Dictionary

recentism

recentism noun: a focus on recent events to the exclusion of history.

Noun

recentism (uncountable)

  1. (rare) A focus on recent events to the exclusion of history.
    • I grant that I might here be suffering from "recentism" — that is, attributing too-great significance to very recent events.1990, Sippanon Kētthat, Robert B. Textor, William Klausner, The Middle Path for the Future of Thailand, page 96
    • […]the tendency in the discipline of international relations to bolster endemic ethnocentrism with temporal short-sightedness – the flaws of parochialism and recentism[…]2007, Ken Booth, Theory of World Security, page 77

Origin of recentism

From recent + -ism.

Questions about recentism

What does recentism mean?
Recentism means a focus on recent events to the exclusion of history.
What part of speech is recentism?
Recentism is a noun.

Words near recentism in the dictionary

  1. recentered
  2. recentering
  3. recenters
  4. recentest
  5. recentish
  6. recentism
  7. recently
  8. recentness
  9. recentralisation
  10. recentralise
  11. recentralization

Source and license

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