ethnocentric
adjective
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The Greek word ethnos means "nation" or "people". So ethnocentricity shows itself in a lack of respect for other ways of life, and an ethnocentric person feels that his or her own nation or group is the cultural center of the world. Ethnocentric describes the kind of person who behaves badly when traveling in foreign countries, often called an "Ugly American" (from a book and movie of the same name). Whenever you hear someone making fun of the way a foreigner speaks English, just remember that it's the foreigner, not the person laughing at him, who actually can speak a foreign language.
Examples of ethnocentric in a Sentence
Kaylee Tornay, Washington Post, 26 Oct. 2022
Christian nationalism refers to an ideology that asserts all civic life in the U.S. should be organized according to a particularly conservative and ethnocentric expression of Christianity.
—Andrew Whitehead, Time, 26 Sep. 2022
Hanging over the search for a native speaker is all the ethnocentric baggage that the concept implies.
—Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2022
Fifty years later, international businesses still behave in a very ethnocentric manner.
—Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj, Forbes, 28 Sep. 2021
My American upbringing had steered me to a pretty ethnocentric assumption: that in a totalitarian government, defiance would exhibit itself as bluntly and topically as in the United States, just with additional concealment.
—Stacey Anderson, Rolling Stone, 24 June 2021
Netflix’s Lupin, a Black French series about an international cat-burglar, a non-ethnocentric character, had 75 million viewers globally in its first month of airing.
—Court Stroud, Forbes, 3 June 2021
Plus, if applied with suitable leverage and departmental support, this is a force strong enough to counterbalance the historical tendency toward anthropocentric and ethnocentric approaches that tend to advantage narrow learner self-interest.
—Amandeep Midha, Forbes, 18 May 2021
To say that feminism is like Nazism is to say feminism is murderous, is ethnocentric violence.
—Alexa Mikhail, USA TODAY, 19 Feb. 2021
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ethnocentric.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Ethnocentric.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ethnocentric. Accessed 20 Apr. 2024.
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ethnocentric
adjective
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