wasm

/ˈwɒz(ə)m/US/ˈwʌz(ə)m/

wasm noun: a doctrine, ideology, rule, or theory that is no longer current or fashionable.

Noun

wasm (plural wasms)

(humorous) A doctrine, ideology, rule, or theory that is no longer current or fashionable.
- Progress is a PLAStic bag; / Come stick in your head and what AILS you will gag. / Gasping the BLUE-in-the-face blues. / When our propaganda spasms turn your isms into wasms, / We'll bag the earth in a PLAStic globe and disconnect your frontal lobe / With our gadget-pop Agitprop air-jet-hop...1960, Peter Viereck, “The Global Lobal Blues [from The Tree Witch]”, in The New Mexico Quarterly, volume 30, Albuquerque, N.M.: Faculty of University of New Mexico, →OCLC, page 356; reprinted in “The...
- The nice thing about an ism, someone once observed, is how quickly it becomes a wasm. Some musical wasms – academic-wasm, for example, and its dependent varieties of modern-wasm and Serial-wasm – continue to linger on artificial life support, though, and continue to threaten the increasingly...1996 March 10, Richard Taruskin, “Classical view: How talented composers become useless”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 05 Oct 2016

plural	wasms

From ism, with jocular substitution of was for is.

What does wasm mean?: Wasm means a doctrine, ideology, rule, or theory that is no longer current or fashionable.
What part of speech is wasm?: Wasm is a noun.
How do you pronounce wasm?: Wasm is pronounced /ˈwɒz(ə)m/ (UK).
What is the plural of wasm?: The plural of wasm is wasms.

Adapted from Wiktionary: wasm (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-wasm.wav.

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