Word.ws English Dictionary

sanism

sanism noun: discrimination and oppression against people who have, or who are labelled or perceived as having, a mental illness.

Noun

sanism (uncountable)

  1. Discrimination and oppression against people who have, or who are labelled or perceived as having, a mental illness.
    • Behaviorists, social scientists, and legal scholars must begin to develop research agendas so as to (1) determine and assess the ultimate impact of sanism, (2) better understand how social science data is manipulated to serve sanist ends, […]2002, Michael L. Perlin, Mental disability law: civil and criminal, volume 1, page 528

Origin of sanism

From sane + -ism, by analogy with racism and sexism.

Questions about sanism

What does sanism mean?
Sanism means discrimination and oppression against people who have, or who are labelled or perceived as having, a mental illness.
What part of speech is sanism?
Sanism is a noun.

Words near sanism in the dictionary

  1. sanipractic
  2. sanipractor
  3. sanipractors
  4. Sanis
  5. Sanislău
  6. sanism
  7. sanist
  8. sanit
  9. sanitaria
  10. sanitarian
  11. sanitarianism

Source and license

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