whiggish
whiggish adjective: characteristic of a Whig; liberal.
Adjective (1)
whiggish (comparative more whiggish, superlative most whiggish)
- Characteristic of a Whig; liberal.
- Characterized by a belief in inevitable progress, and tending to evaluate the past by the standards of the present; see Whig history.
- Near-synonym: presentist
- Finally, whiggish narratives, strewn with heroes, only hinder understanding of how the world works.2012 October 3, Rebekah Higgitt, “Why whiggish won't do”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
Adjective (2) capitalized: Whiggish
Whiggish (comparative more Whiggish, superlative most Whiggish)
- Alternative letter-case form of whiggish.
Examples of whiggish in a sentence
- Abilafia’s article is a classic example of an old-fashioned “Whiggish” narrative.2015 May 15, Rebekah Higgitt, “Beware Eurosceptic versions of history and science”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
- Because this whiggish view depends on the expectation of progress, liberal politicians are more suspectible to it than their conservative brethren.2015 December 21, David A. Graham, “The Wrong Side of 'the Right Side of History'”, in The Atlantic:
- Of course, the reason we know all this—the reason the episode keeps turning up in Whiggish histories of technology—is that Plato wrote it down.2025 October 26, Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Age of De-Skilling”, in The Atlantic:
Forms of whiggish
| comparative | more whiggish |
|---|---|
| superlative | most whiggish |
| alternative form | Whiggish |
| comparative | more Whiggish |
| superlative | most Whiggish |
Origin of whiggish
From Whig + -ish.
Words formed from whiggish
Questions about whiggish
- What does whiggish mean?
- Whiggish means characteristic of a Whig; liberal.
- How do you use whiggish in a sentence?
- Abilafia’s article is a classic example of an old-fashioned “Whiggish” narrative.
- What part of speech is whiggish?
- Whiggish is an adjective.
Words near whiggish in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whiggish (page history and authors); Whiggish (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: “whiggish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whiggish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.