Word.ws English Dictionary

visual kei

/ˌvɪʒuːəl ˈkeɪ/UK/ˌvɪzjuːəl ˈkeɪ/

visual kei noun: a Japanese music and fashion movement that emerged in the 1980s, characterized by a bold, extravagant, androgynous style influenced by glam rock and goth culture.

visual kei: a Japanese music and fashion movement that emerged in the 1980s, characterized by a bold,...
Image: Jacob Ehnmark from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

visual kei (uncountable)

  1. A Japanese music and fashion movement that emerged in the 1980s, characterized by a bold, extravagant, androgynous style influenced by glam rock and goth culture.
    • Incidentally, I'm not sure you're bucking the trend so much as going along with it; FTM crossplay is getting pretty popular, although you see more women going for bishounen and visual-kei genderfucky stars than anything else.2001 May 22, Wednesday, “Re: 'There are only 500 REAL anime fans in the UK'”, in uk.media.animation.anime (Usenet), message-ID <-6y*A5OWo@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>

Noun (2) capitalized: Visual Kei

Visual Kei (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of visual kei

Noun (3) capitalized: Visual kei

Visual kei (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of visual kei.

Origin of visual kei

From Japanese ヴィジュアル系(けい) (vijuaru-kei, literally “visual style”), composed of ヴィジュアル (vijuaru, “visual”), itself from English visual, and 系 (kei, “style”).

Questions about visual kei

What does visual kei mean?
Visual kei means a Japanese music and fashion movement that emerged in the 1980s, characterized by a bold, extravagant, androgynous style influenced by glam rock and goth culture.
What part of speech is visual kei?
Visual kei is a noun.
How do you pronounce visual kei?
Visual kei is pronounced /ˌvɪʒuːəl ˈkeɪ/.

Words near visual kei in the dictionary

  1. visual effects
  2. visual field
  3. visual fields
  4. visual hole
  5. visual holes
  6. visual kei
  7. visual language
  8. visual languages
  9. visual magnitude
  10. visual magnitudes
  11. visual merchandiser

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: visual kei (page history and authors); Visual Kei (page history and authors); Visual kei (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: “visual kei.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/visual_kei. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.