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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
chauvinism
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
male
▪ He got a little tired of her complaints that male chauvinism had stopped her getting a book out.
▪ We doubt if any of the men on translation committees or who did their own translations are conscious of any male chauvinism.
▪ But to ascribe this to male chauvinism wouldn't be accurate either.
▪ Marriage experts have slammed Laura's ideas as offensive and pandering to male chauvinism.
▪ Hence also the exaggerated tribalism, the bullheaded racism of an Alf Garnett, the dogged male chauvinism of an Andy Capp.
▪ He's had a lifelong fight with feminists who accuse him of extreme male chauvinism and damaging their dignity.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ The academy was labeled a stronghold of male chauvinism.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Bandaranaike used Sinhalese chauvinism to gain power, but found he could not control it.
▪ But to ascribe this to male chauvinism wouldn't be accurate either.
▪ For the less sophisticated, it was chauvinism.
▪ He got a little tired of her complaints that male chauvinism had stopped her getting a book out.
▪ Perhaps it is because of a hearty dislike of chauvinism and exaggerated nationalism that I have not become an intense patriot.
▪ The absence of media chauvinism is testimony, Morris Matthews believes, to the women's communication skills.
▪ They regard a last-minute request to spend the weekend collating figures in Darlington as proof positive of their triumph against chauvinism.
▪ This sense is often identified with nationalism and patriotism which can be dangerously close to racism, chauvinism and xenophobia.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Chauvinism

Chauvinism \Chau"vin*ism\, n. [F. chauvinisme, from Nicolas Chauvin, a character represented as making grotesque and threatening displays of his attachment to his fallen chief, Napoleon I., in 1815 (in the play La Cocarde tricolor, 1831).]

  1. Blind and absurd devotion to a fallen leader or an obsolete cause; hence, absurdly vainglorious or exaggerated patriotism.

  2. exaggerated and unreasoning partisanship to any group or cause; -- as, male chauvinism, i.e. belief in the superiority of males. [PJC] -- Chau"vin*ist, n. & adj. -- Chau`vin*is"tic, a.

    Note: To have a generous belief in the greatness of one's country is not chauvinism. It is the character of the latter quality to be wildly extravagant, to be fretful and childish and silly, to resent a doubt as an insult, and to offend by its very frankness.
    --Prof. H. Tuttle.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
chauvinism

1840, "exaggerated, blind nationalism; patriotism degenerated into a vice," from French chauvinisme (1839), from the character Nicholas Chauvin, soldier of Napoleon's Grand Armee, notoriously attached to the Empire long after it was history, in the Cogniards' popular 1831 vaudeville "La Cocarde Tricolore." Meaning extended to "sexism" via male chauvinism (1969).\n

\nThe name is a French form of Latin Calvinus and thus Calvinism and chauvinism are, etymologically, twins. The name was a common one in Napoleon's army, and if there was a real person at the base of the character in the play, he has not been certainly identified by etymologists, though memoirs of Waterloo (one published in Paris in 1822) mention "one of our principal piqueurs, named Chauvin, who had returned with Napoleon from Elba," which implies loyalty.

Wiktionary
chauvinism

n. 1 (context pejorative English) Excessive patriotism, eagerness for national superiority; jingoism. 2 (context pejorative English) Unwarranted bias, favoritism, or devotion to one's own particular group, cause, or idea.

WordNet
chauvinism
  1. n. fanatical patriotism [syn: jingoism, superpatriotism, ultranationalism]

  2. activity indicative of belief in the superiority of men over women [syn: male chauvinism, antifeminism]

Wikipedia
Chauvinism

Chauvinism is an exaggerated patriotism and a belligerent belief in national superiority and glory.

According to legend, French soldier Nicolas Chauvin was badly wounded in the Napoleonic wars. He received a pension for his injuries but it was not enough to live on. After Napoleon abdicated, Chauvin was a fanatical Bonapartist despite the unpopularity of this view in Bourbon Restoration France. His single-minded blind devotion to his cause, despite neglect by his faction and harassment by its enemies, started the use of the term.

Chauvinism has extended from its original use to include fanatical devotion and undue partiality to any group or cause to which one belongs, especially when such partisanship includes prejudice against or hostility toward outsiders or rival groups and persists even in the face of overwhelming opposition. This French quality finds its parallel in the British term jingoism, which has retained the meaning of chauvinism strictly in its original sense; that is, an attitude of belligerent nationalism.

In contemporary English, the word has come to be used as shorthand for male chauvinism, a trend reflected in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, which begins its entry on chauvinism with "an attitude that the members of your own sex are always better than those of the opposite sex."

Usage examples of "chauvinism".

Nor would Areopagus or Akropolis be puzzled so much had St Paul preached to them the modern European Christianity with its complicated spirit of all kinds of compromises with Heaven and Hell, compromise with the State, Plutocracy, Nationalism, Imperialism, Conquest, War, Diplomacy, Secular Philosophy, Secular Science, Agnostic Parliaments, Tribal Chauvinism, Education, Officialism, Bureaucracy, etc.

The herd instincts must be satisfied at whatever cost, and have been in the past through such mechanisms as warfare, religion, nationalism, partyism and various forms of group chauvinism.

Chauvinism was a matter of absinthe, natural evil, and Gabrielle Rouget.

The greatest amount of unrecognized and unchallenged chauvinism is at work.

In chapters 8 and 9 we realized how the social-emotional dependency and the oppression involved in sex roles and chauvinism can cause special problems for married women.

She would have deliberately chosen Selwey for his chauvinism, then sent Art in to front for her.

Germany's insecurity before 1940 created an extreme chauvinism, leading to wars of conquest and to gas chambers.

Scientists also exhibit biases connected with human chauvinisms and with our intellectual limitations.

Albert Einstein, a keen critic of prejudice and privilege all his life, considered this "absolute" physics a remnant of an increasingly discredited Earth chauvinism.

There is something special about our time—not just the temporal chauvinism that those who reside in any epoch doubtless feel, but something, as outlined above, clearly unique and strictly relevant to our species' future chances: This is the first time that (a) our exponentiating technology has reached the precipice of self-destruction, but also the first time that (b) we can postpone or avoid destruction by going somewhere else, somewhere off the Earth.

Contact with another intelligent species on a planet of some other star – a species biologically far more different from us than dolphins or whales – may help us to cast off our baggage of accumulated jingoisms, from nationalism to human chauvinism.

But still, with the intellectual chauvinism inherent in our monolinear orientation, we assumed that the wavefront of simultaneous reality advanced everywhere at the same rate.

It would be good to leave behind the painful chauvinism of Earth standard gravity and get back home to the normal gravity of Mars, he thought, and hurried on his way.