Word.ws English Dictionary

thanatism

thanatism noun: the belief that the human soul eventually dies.

Noun

thanatism (uncountable)

  1. The belief that the human soul eventually dies.
    • Or to put it in the bracingly original terms of “The Second Plane,” it is misology that is the cause of thanatism.2008 April 27, Leon Wieseltier, “The Catastrophist”, in New York Times

Origin of thanatism

From thanato- + -ism. Coined by Ernst Haeckel.

Questions about thanatism

What does thanatism mean?
Thanatism means the belief that the human soul eventually dies.
What part of speech is thanatism?
Thanatism is a noun.

Words near thanatism in the dictionary

  1. thanahs
  2. thanakha
  3. thanas
  4. thanatechnology
  5. thanatic
  6. thanatism
  7. thanatist
  8. thanatists
  9. thanato-
  10. thanatocentric
  11. thanatochemical

Source and license

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