Meaning
The defining spirit, mood, or intellectual and cultural climate of a particular era, as shown in its ideas, tastes, and attitudes. A fairly formal, often journalistic word, nearly always used with the definite article. Compared with the philosophical weight the term carries in German thought, everyday English use is more casual and cultural than metaphysical. Neutral to slightly lofty register, common in journalism, criticism, and marketing, and almost always preceded by 'the'. Regional use: General English (borrowed from German).
Origin
German Zeit 'time' plus Geist 'spirit', literally 'spirit of the time'. The German compound is documented from 1769, when the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder used it in his essay Kritische Wälder to render the Latin phrase genius seculi ('spirit of the age'); it was popularised in German by Herder and Goethe, and although often linked to Hegel, he generally preferred the phrase Geist der Zeiten. It reached English in the early 19th century: Thomas Carlyle used it as a German loanword in Sartor Resartus (1831), Merriam-Webster dates first known use to 1835, and the Online Etymology Dictionary records a full English definition by 1848, 'the general drift of thought or feeling which particularly characterizes any given period of time'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Usage Examples
- The film captures the zeitgeist of the early 1990s perfectly, from the soundtrack to the slang.
- Her column argues that nostalgia has become the defining zeitgeist of the decade.
- You cannot explain the sudden popularity of that design movement without the wider zeitgeist of postwar optimism.