postcolonial

adjective

post·​co·​lo·​nial ˌpōst-kə-ˈlō-nē-əl How to pronounce postcolonial (audio)
-nyəl
: of, relating to, or being a time after colonialism
postcolonial America
Carter was the first American president to take seriously the entire postcolonial era that has remade the globe since World War II.Garry Wills

Examples of postcolonial in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web
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Ba Khin was one of a small number of prominent Buddhist lay meditation teachers in late colonial and early postcolonial Burma. Daniel M. Stuart, The Conversation, 16 Mar. 2026 At the same time, my intimate awareness of the many challenges, setbacks, and disasters of postcolonial nation building during the cold war precluded the reflexive Western attitude toward Iran of fear and loathing underpinned by near-total ignorance. Pankaj Mishra, The New York Review of Books, 13 Mar. 2026 Yet Mauritius faces many of the familiar problems of a postcolonial society. David Frum, The Atlantic, 2 Mar. 2026 Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly mapped postcolonial theory onto post-Soviet contexts, treating Russian imperial expansion as analogous to Western colonialism. Anel Rakhimzhanova, Artforum, 1 Mar. 2026 See All Example Sentences for postcolonial

Word History

First Known Use

1883, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of postcolonial was in 1883

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Cite this Entry

“Postcolonial.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/postcolonial. Accessed 26 Mar. 2026.

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