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Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian army officer who in 1933 founded Norway's fascist party. In December 1939, he met with Adolf Hitler and urged him to occupy Norway. Following the German invasion of April 1940, Quisling served as a figurehead in the puppet government set up by the German occupation forces, and his linguistic fate was sealed. Before the end of 1940, quisling was being used generically in English to refer to any traitor. Winston Churchill, George Orwell, and H. G. Wells used it in their wartime writings. Quisling lived to see his name thus immortalized, but not much longer. He was executed for treason soon after the liberation of Norway in 1945.
Examples of quisling in a Sentence
Kevin Rennie, Hartford Courant, 21 Mar. 2026
But the president's new FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, is an outspoken Big Tech critic on X and is signaling the panel won't be stacked with pro-industry quislings.
—Marc Caputo, Axios, 10 Feb. 2025
Erdogan, meanwhile, lambasted Kilicdaroglu as a quisling who is in cahoots with the West and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Kurdish separatist group that both Ankara and Washington consider a terrorist entity.
—Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2023
And Kilicdaroglu was an easy mark for Erdogan, who has belittled him for years and cast him during the campaign as both a terrorist and a quisling for Western interests — accusations that stuck in the minds of some voters.
—Kareem Fahim, Washington Post, 27 May 2023
This may sound like a technical squabble among quislings.
—David Z. Morris, Slate Magazine, 6 June 2017
Cite this Entry
“Quisling.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quisling. Accessed 12 Jun. 2026.
Copy CitationKids Definition
quisling
noun
Noun
named for Vidkun Quisling 1887–1945, a Norwegian politician who helped the German invaders in World War II
