secessionist
Americannoun
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of secessionist
Explanation
A secessionist is someone who wants to break away from a larger group. People who make plans to split from their government and form a new country are secessionists. Secessionist comes from secede, "formally withdraw from," and its Latin roots, which mean "go apart." A secessionist wants to make a break, almost always from their country. The Civil War was a fight between the Union and a coalition of 11 secessionist states that supported slavery. These states split off from the rest of the country after Abraham Lincoln was elected on an anti-slavery platform.
Vocabulary lists containing secessionist
Unit 1: Telling Details
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Vocabulary from Readings 2, Unit 1
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Lincoln's Spymaster
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Secessionist parties won a regional election in December, but they have failed to agree on how the region should be ruled.
From Washington Post • Feb. 23, 2018
Secessionist rhetoric revealed a variety of motives and ambitions.
From Textbooks • Jan. 18, 2018
Secessionist southerners declared their separateness from the rest of the nation with separate texts to indoctrinate their children.
From Slate • Dec. 8, 2017
Here in Vegas, a city he bizarrely considers to be like Vienna during the Secessionist period, he’s in his element being out of this element.
From The Guardian • Jan. 23, 2016
In Texas the general feeling was on the whole Secessionist, but the Governor was a Unionist, and succeeded for a time in preventing definite action.
From A History of the United States by Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
