Popularist
adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An artist or composer whose work appeals to popular tastes.
"Three composers in the study are undoubted popularists."
- 2 One who adapts and popularizes a subject.
"Here, she has no greater debt than to Sylvester Graham, originally a New Jersey minister who found a more successful calling as the popularist of what his magnum opus summarily entitled The New Science of Human Life."
- 3 On who advocates populism.
"The so-called 'popularists' attempted to exploit the urge of the masses of the Western Ukrainian lands for enlightenment and cultural education in their native tongue in order to strengthen the dominant position of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie."
- 4 One who explains social phenomena in terms of popular responses and habits.
"Despite the paucity of early psychological research on the consequences of job transfers, popularists have been quick to point to the negative consequences of transfer: heart attacks in men, depression in women, maladjustment in children."
- 1 Reflecting popular taste and opinion.
"There have been others, of course, antagonistic to established authority, whose philosophy has been anything but popularist, but it is not the popularist basis of Benn's antiauthoritarianism that is peculiar."
Example
More examples"There have been others, of course, antagonistic to established authority, whose philosophy has been anything but popularist, but it is not the popularist basis of Benn's antiauthoritarianism that is peculiar."
Etymology
From popular + -ist.
More for "popularist"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.