Word.ws English Dictionary

us-and-them

us-and-them adjective: being or pertaining to a divisive belief whereby those outside one's immediate circle are regarded as enemies.

Adjective

us-and-them (not comparable)

  1. Being or pertaining to a divisive belief whereby those outside one's immediate circle are regarded as enemies.
    • Good football teams always have an us-and-them mentality; there are the 45 players and their coaches, and then there is everybody else.1987, New York Magazine
    • […] one of the major concerns by staff is the lack of social contact with an SMT and an 'us and them' syndrome developing.1992, Jack Dunham, Stress in Teaching

Questions about us-and-them

What does us-and-them mean?
Us-and-them means being or pertaining to a divisive belief whereby those outside one's immediate circle are regarded as enemies.
What part of speech is us-and-them?
Us-and-them is an adjective.

Words near us-and-them in the dictionary

  1. us's
  2. us'un
  3. us'uns
  4. US-American
  5. US-Americans
  6. us-and-them
  7. us-and-them-ism
  8. US-anian
  9. US-anians
  10. US-ASCII
  11. us-en

Source and license

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