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defeatist Definition

de·feat·ist (-ist)

noun

a person who too readily accepts or expects defeat

Etymology: Fr défaitiste

adjective

of or characteristic of a defeatist

Related Forms:

defeatist Usage Examples

Converse of object

  • become: It is far too easy to become defeatist, far too easy to claim that we cannot compete in the Tests that lie ahead.

Adjective modifier

  • revolutionary: Those who advocated a ' revolutionary defeatist ' policy in the Second World War assumed something similar would occur.

Modifies a noun

  • attitude: The defeatist attitude shown in the face of the nationwide report is not good.
  • position: The result was that the defeatist position adopted in 1938 by the founding congress of the Trotskyist Fourth International lacked political purchase.
  • line: To say this, however, is still not to imply that the defeatist strategic line was wrong.
  • policy: The first and the essence of the split was Lenin's response to World War I - the idea of a defeatist policy.
  • notion: They fought the defeatist notion that the socialist ratchet was irreversible.
  • statement: Yes Mark, it does sound like a naïve, foolish, and defeatist statement.

Modifying Another Word

  • rather: In this article I shall argue that to think simply like this would be wrong and rather defeatist.
  • too: And they are in too defeatist a frame of mind to think positively.
  • so: We can do something about it, and I can't understand why all the left has become so defeatist.
  • not: Yet the consultation paper takes a very complacent if not defeatist line on such issues.

Used with adjective complement

  • become: In Scotland and Northern Ireland over the last two decades, unionism has become defeatist, defensive and apprehensive about the future.

Browse dictionary entries near defeatist

  1. defeatism
  2. defeated
  3. defeat
  4. defeasible
  5. defeasance
  6. DefCon
  7. Defaults
  8. defaulter
  9. default risk
  10. default judgment
  1. defeature
  2. defecate
  3. defecated
  4. defecating
  5. defecation
  6. defecator
  7. defect
  8. defection
  9. defective
  10. defectively