Word.ws English Dictionary

saviorism

/ˈseɪvjəɹɪzm/

saviorism noun: belief in a savior.

Noun

saviorism (uncountable)

  1. Belief in a savior.
    • On a universal plane, man's belief in his prospective immortality through saviorism has been breached by a theory of knowledge where he cannot accept saviorism; so he becomes responsible for himself […]2014, Joseph Isaac Abrahams, Terra Incognita: A Psychoanalyst Explores the Human Soul, page 154
  2. A worldview according to which some people are saviors and others need to be saved by them.
    • I show how white men attempted to save brown women from brown men in colonial India. […] Spivak notes the efforts to build discourses of saviorism in thinking about Muslim women and Muslim men.2016, Heather Ashley Hayes, Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars

Forms of saviorism

alternative formsaviourism

Origin of saviorism

From savior + -ism.

Questions about saviorism

What does saviorism mean?
Saviorism means belief in a savior.
What part of speech is saviorism?
Saviorism is a noun.
How do you pronounce saviorism?
Saviorism is pronounced /ˈseɪvjəɹɪzm/.

Words near saviorism in the dictionary

  1. savior complex
  2. savior complexes
  3. savioress
  4. savioresses
  5. saviorhood
  6. saviorism
  7. saviorless
  8. saviors
  9. saviorship
  10. saviour
  11. saviour sibling

Source and license

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