Wokelash
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A backlash against media, speech, etc. deemed inconsistent with social justice principles, or viewed as perpetuating unwoke or reactionary ideas.
"A “wokelash”, I called it, a backlash designed to denounce Friends’s ageing values. I was scathing about this wokelash at first: all those youngsters raising their voices in condemnation, so confident that the things they thought and said, felt and believed wouldn't seem preposterously outdated 25 years hence too… but then I realised you only judge a cultural property by today's values if it is still relevant according to today’s standards and habits."
- 2 A backlash against or mass rejection of wokeness, or of media, policies, etc. deemed woke or politically correct.
"There is a solid demographic of people who are fed up with what they see as increasingly rigid progressive ideals who feel clamped by the modern liberal consensus. […] Liberal ideals are being subjected to a wokelash, and telling people what they should and shouldn’t culturally consume is not going to help build any bridges between divided factions."
Example
More examples"A “wokelash”, I called it, a backlash designed to denounce Friends’s ageing values. I was scathing about this wokelash at first: all those youngsters raising their voices in condemnation, so confident that the things they thought and said, felt and believed wouldn't seem preposterously outdated 25 years hence too… but then I realised you only judge a cultural property by today's values if it is still relevant according to today’s standards and habits."
Etymology
Blend of woke + backlash.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.