Find the word definition

Crossword clues for defeatist

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
defeatist
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A few hundred yards away at Conservative Central Office the mood has been more subdued, though not defeatist.
▪ In my view, then, it was rather defeatist from a vocational standpoint to adopt a stance like Mr Graham's.
▪ It is difficult to understand why the Democratic leadership should have been quite so defeatist in 1981.
▪ That is what we seek to do, rather than adopting a defeatist attitude to the delivery of health care.
▪ Those who belittle the value of new integrative speculation are, in a phrase of Bennett's, dogmatically defeatist.
▪ What a sceptical or defeatist system needs is motivation.
▪ Yet it would be wrong to end this chapter on a defeatist note.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
defeatist

1918, adjective and noun, in reference to pacifists and political opposition in Britain, from French défaitiste, which was used there in reference to the Russians who sought to end their war with Germany; see defeat (n.) + -ist. Their opposition, in the original Russian context, were called defensists.\n

Wiktionary
defeatist

a. of, or relating to defeatism n. someone who advocates defeatism, or has such an attitude

WordNet
defeatist

n. someone who is resigned to defeat [syn: negativist]

Usage examples of "defeatist".

In the summer the left-wing intelligentsia were completely defeatist, far more so than they allowed to appear in print.

Also, if things went badly enough on the Home Front, the whole of the poorer section of the working class might swing round to a position that was defeatist though not actively pro-Hitler.

You can see how each strain of German propaganda corresponds to one existing, or at any rate potential, defeatist faction.

But the various strains of defeatist feelings are there, and at some time they may grow.

The Labour Party had no guts, the pinks were defeatist, the Communists effectively pro-Nazi, and in any case there did not exist on the Left one single man of really nationwide reputation.

The extreme Left still tends to be defeatist, except as regards the Russian front, and at each stage of the African campaign its press has clung almost desperately to a pessimistic interpretation of events.

Tried to talk us into going along with your defeatist policy, abandon everything up here and taking orders from you instead.

Dr Daruwalla feared that the Jesuit had been schooled to refute any defeatist argument.

But there was also a defeatist pleasure in seeing one particular mystery cleared up.

Mouthing hysterically, Gomes threatened them with his gun, calling them defeatists who had sold out to the people at the coast.

Were we to let your cowardly defeatists ride parasite on the work we were doing?

Mouthing furiously, Gomes confronted them with his gun, calling them fools and traitors who had sold out to the defeatists at the coast.

The Defeatists might view their first duty as to their political associates rather than to the abstract ideal of our kingdom.

Defeatist allies and his sodality, Nstasius offered no further protest.

Defeatist thoughts wrung no mercy from the brusque presence of Kharadmon.