Word.ws English Dictionary

symbolist

symbolist adjective: of or pertaining to the Symbolist movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century European arts and literature.

Adjective

symbolist (not comparable)

  1. Of or pertaining to the Symbolist movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century European arts and literature
    • The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling up out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society, African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and modern, mostly airplanes and automatons.2007 April 15, Randy Kennedy, “When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies”, in New York Times

Noun

symbolist (plural symbolists)

  1. One who employs symbols.
  2. A symbolist poet or artist.
    • The symbolists had not all an explicit philosophy; but they were all aware of potencies in the world or in themselves which language cannot articulately express, and which are yet more vitally real than the 'facts' which we can grasp and handle, and the 'respectable' people whom we can measure and...1920, C.H. Herford, “Recent tendencies in European poetry”, in Francis Sydney Marvin, editor, Recent Developments in European Thought
  3. (artificial intelligence) A proponent of symbolic artificial intelligence.
    • At the helm of the symbolists was [Frank] Rosenblatt’s nemesis, MIT professor Marvin Minsky.2025, Karen Hao, Empire of AI, New York City: Penguin Press, →ISBN

symbolist meaning in Punjabi

symbolist in Punjabi

someone employing symbols
ਚਿੰਨ੍ਹਵਾਦੀ cinnhvādī

Forms of symbolist

pluralsymbolists

Origin of symbolist

From French symboliste, coined by French poet Paul Verlaine in 1885.

Words formed from symbolist

Questions about symbolist

What does symbolist mean?
Symbolist means of or pertaining to the Symbolist movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century European arts and literature.
What is symbolist in Punjabi?
Symbolist in Punjabi is ਚਿੰਨ੍ਹਵਾਦੀ (cinnhvādī). See Symbolist meaning in Punjabi.
What part of speech is symbolist?
Symbolist can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near symbolist in the dictionary

  1. symbolisers
  2. symbolises
  3. symbolising
  4. symbolism
  5. symbolisms
  6. symbolist
  7. symbolistic
  8. symbolistical
  9. symbolistically
  10. symbolists
  11. symbolizable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: symbolist (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “symbolist.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/symbolist. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.