cultist

noun

cult·​ist ˈkəl-tist 

plural cultists

: a member of a cult: such as

a

: a devotee or member of a religious cult

In 1826 … Shakers were persecuted as cultists distinguished by their use of dance in worship, their celibacy and their belief in their founder, Mother Ann, as equal to Jesus.

—Robert Minkoff

b

: one who exhibits great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, etc.

… at a time when the Kinks don't even have an American record deal, it's heartening for aging Kinks cultists that Ray Davies has found a domestic publisher for X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography, a book that was published in England last year.

—David Wild

Although Pierce has seen reruns of the actress's films, he insists he is not a [Marilyn] Monroe cultist.

—David Wallace

If the paranoid cultists and survivalists are right, and the apocalypse is right around the corner, who do we want leading the nation through the pestilence, famine and plagues of locusts?

—Sparkle Hayter

Examples of cultist in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Players are ordinary people who are drawn into a secret world of secretive cultists, unknowable horrors and mind shattering revelations. —Rob Wieland, Forbes.com, 17 June 2025

Musk was certainly behaving like a moonstruck cultist. —Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 5 June 2025

Like when Jesse makes the perfectly reasonable decision not to mount a doomed attempt to save a cultist when they're outnumbered by WLF members. —ArsTechnica, 27 May 2025

There, Sith cultists had been working to keep Palpatine's vision for a New Empire alive by building an unstoppable armada. —Nick Romano, EW.com, 25 May 2025

Though they’re not credited as such, each character in the script was based on an actual member of the Manson family, and the film’s research department provided copious reference material to the real cultists. —Nate Jones, Vulture, 8 May 2025

But the cultists, who are from the game, evoke some of the sillier and more pretentious elements of The Walking Dead, and the point about the danger the Wolves present could have been made without that interlude. —Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 27 Apr. 2025

Across that time, the actions undertaken by the player are largely the same: carefully navigating a hostile environment in order to find enough supplies to dispatch or slip past a small army of infected, cultists, or militia members. —Joshua Rivera, Vulture, 21 Apr. 2025

Demons move in waves over cliffs slick with rain, cultists chanting in perfect circles, pentagrams glowing beneath their feet. —Kazuma Hashimoto, Rolling Stone, 31 Mar. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1898, in the meaning defined above