Canutish
adj
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Adjective
- 1 Futilely attempting to stop the unstoppable.
"Whether or not the more extreme expressions of these fears are justified, gigantic commercial and cultural forces unleashed in the last decade mean that Canutish resistance to the digitisation of large swathes of academic culture is futile."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"Whether or not the more extreme expressions of these fears are justified, gigantic commercial and cultural forces unleashed in the last decade mean that Canutish resistance to the digitisation of large swathes of academic culture is futile."
Etymology
From Canute + -ish, referring to the legend of King Canute and the waves.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.