Word.ws English Dictionary

victimage

victimage noun: the state of being a victim.

Noun

victimage (countable and uncountable, plural victimages)

  1. The state of being a victim.
    • It was a source of murmuring discontent to her, in the first years of an intelligent girlhood, to feel how entirely they (for it was always 'they' in her thought) had been shut out from the fairer social world, the victims of she scarcely knew what, but helpless in that victimage, and utterly weak...1851 October, Caroline Chesebro, “Hearts of Oak”, in Knickerbocker, Or, New-York Monthly Magazine, volume 38, page 399
    • Constant victimage to a feeble stomach while instrumenting Tannhäuser. (1845.)1903, The Lancet, page 306
  2. The act of scapegoating a person or group in order to avoid societal guilt.
    • What is so terrible about victimage is that, invariably, one man's guilt, or a group's guilt, results in some other person's or persons' injury or death.1983, William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, page 151
    • Both aesthetic and social logic motivate the victimages.1990, Richard Schechner, Willa Appel, By Means of Performance, page 215

Examples of victimage in a sentence

  • Exploration of the victim's history can bring about the insight that the victimage is more than coincidence and that he has had a part in promoting it.2014, Herbert S Strean, Psychoanalytic Approaches With the Hostile and Violent Patient:
  • Victimage and populism work in conjunction.1994, Argumentation and Advocacy:
  • This book views the war on terrorism from Kenneth Burke's perspective— dramatism and the related concept of victimage ritual —and the problematic of ruling liberal societies.2016, Michael Blain, Power, Discourse and Victimage Ritual in the War on Terror:

Forms of victimage

pluralvictimages

Origin of victimage

From victim + -age.

Questions about victimage

What does victimage mean?
Victimage means the state of being a victim.
How do you use victimage in a sentence?
Exploration of the victim's history can bring about the insight that the victimage is more than coincidence and that he has had a part in promoting it.
What part of speech is victimage?
Victimage is a noun.
What is the plural of victimage?
The plural of victimage is victimages.

Words near victimage in the dictionary

  1. victim-blame
  2. victim-blamed
  3. victim-blames
  4. victim-blamey
  5. victim-blaming
  6. victimage
  7. victimages
  8. victimaries
  9. victimary
  10. victimate
  11. victimates

Source and license

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