Pollyannaism

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Persistent irrational optimism. uncountable

    "[…] some good guys at the Secretariat decided that 1975 should be International Women’s Year. ¶ It is typical of the special brand of United Nations Pollyannaism that they did so regardless of the fact that Secretariat hiring policies are grossly discriminatory."

Synonyms

All synonyms
cheerfulnessoptimismpanglossianism

Example

More examples

"[…] some good guys at the Secretariat decided that 1975 should be International Women’s Year. ¶ It is typical of the special brand of United Nations Pollyannaism that they did so regardless of the fact that Secretariat hiring policies are grossly discriminatory."

Etymology

From Pollyanna + -ism.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.