Robinsonade
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A genre of adventure fiction where a hero is stranded alone on a desert island and has to survive with their own wits.
"Much, perhaps most, Minecraft fiction follows the robinsonade template, emphasizing the day-to-day life of a character, including nonhuman characters, striving to survive and thrive in a recognizably Minecraftian world by utilizing its resources."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of robinsonade. alt-of
"The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine."
Example
More examples"Much, perhaps most, Minecraft fiction follows the robinsonade template, emphasizing the day-to-day life of a character, including nonhuman characters, striving to survive and thrive in a recognizably Minecraftian world by utilizing its resources."
Etymology
Borrowed from German Robinsonade, analyzable in English as Robinson + -ade, named after fictional character Robinson Crusoe, from Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.
Related phrases
More for "robinsonade"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.