anomie · noun — alienation or social instability caused by erosion of standards and values. It carries an Arena rating of 1766, earned across 34 head-to-head judged battles.
Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, anomie ranks #47 of 17,176 for Most Incisive Words, #373 of 17,188 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #1,284 of 17,171 for Scariest Words, #1,701 of 17,162 for Most Elegant Words.
anomie is pronounced /ˈæn.ə.mi/.
Why “anomie” is a great word
ANOMIE — [Noun] A state of societal or personal disintegration arising from the breakdown or absence of shared norms and values. From French anomie, from Ancient Greek ἀνομία (anomía, “lawlessness”), from ἄνομος (ánomos, “lawless”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + νόμος (nómos, “law”). Popularized in the late 19th century by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Unlike alienation, which focuses on the individual's feeling of separation, or anarchy, which denotes the absence of political authority, anomie is the ambient void where the rules themselves have evaporated. It is the hollow ring of a promise no one believes, the disorienting silence after the old rules are shouted down but no new ones whispered, and the vertigo of standing before a hundred identical doors with no signpost to any of them—the profound disquiet of a world without a shared script.
❧ Essay by Lexicurio’s AI · definition, etymology & citations from published sources
Etymology
From French anomie, from Ancient Greek ἀνομία (anomía, “lawlessness”), from ἄνομος (ánomos, “lawless”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + νόμος (nómos, “law”). Popularized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
noun
- Alienation or social instability caused by erosion of standards and values.e.g.“This is in line with sociologist Emile Durkheim's seminal study Suicide (1897 [1997]), which argued that "anomie", or normlessness, could explain variations in suicide rates across countries and time.” — 2019, Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, Andrew Cherlin, Robert Francis, “The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men”, in Journal of Economic Perspectives:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.