syncretism
noun
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The ancient Greeks used the term synkrētismos to refer to Cretan cities allied in opposition to a common enemy. In the early 17th century, English speakers adopted the term in the anglicized form syncretism to refer to the union of different religious beliefs. Three centuries later, lexicographers of the 1909 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language added a new definition of syncretism ("the union or fusion into one or two or more originally different inflectional forms, as of two cases"), but this specialized sense is rarely encountered outside of the field of linguistics. Some related terms that you are more likely to encounter are syncretize ("to attempt to unite and harmonize"), syncretist ("one who advocates syncretism"), and syncretic and syncretistic ("characterized or brought about by syncretism").
Examples of syncretism in a Sentence
Celina Pereira, Los Angeles Times, 28 Jan. 2026
Unable to recognize syncretism and change, many political scientists condemned themselves to an increasingly untenable intellectual predicament, in which Trumpism, while troubling, was still somehow a completely familiar phenomenon, shoehorned into hardened, preexisting categories.
—Jason Blakely, Harpers Magazine, 30 Dec. 2025
This syncretism was eventually used by the Spanish as a tool to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism.
—Luisa Navarro, Vogue, 31 Oct. 2025
Zea set out, at one point, to document this syncretism.
—Ana Karina Zatarain, New Yorker, 21 June 2025
Forbidden from openly worshiping their Orishas, enslaved Africans covertly prayed to these deities by linking them with Catholic saints in a practice known as syncretism.
—Essence, 10 Oct. 2024
An exaltation of the summers of his youth, Bad Bunny’s fourth album also serves as a crash course in Caribbean musical syncretism, in which elements of reggaetón, trap, house, and Dominican mambo are craftily shaken and stirred.
—Pitchfork, 1 Oct. 2024
Their religion, Mexican syncretism, worships the forces of nature, the animals of the jungle, and the planets in the sky.
—Travel + Leisure Editors, Travel + Leisure, 22 June 2023
The second was cultural, defining Indian society by the values of tolerance, pluralism, and syncretism.
—Milan Vaishnav, Foreign Affairs, 6 May 2019
Cite this Entry
“Syncretism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syncretism. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.
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