Barthes

American

[bahrt, bart] / bɑrt, bært /

noun

Roland, 1915–80, French literary critic, philosopher, and semiotician.

Barthes British

/ bart /

noun

Roland . 1915–80, French writer and critic, who applied structuralist theory to literature and popular culture: his books include Mythologies (1957) and Elements of Semiology (1964)

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

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.

“For me, color is an artifice,” the French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote in 1980.

From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 21, 2025

Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who worked in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, just as Jung did.

From Salon • Nov. 29, 2024

Barthes concludes, “but to conceive the inconceivable, i.e., to leave nothing outside the words and to concede nothing ineffable to the world.”

From Slate • Feb. 21, 2023

From the left, French essayist Roland Barthes dismissed the huge assembly of more than 500 photographs from 68 countries as “conventional humanism.”

From Los Angeles Times • Jul. 28, 2022

The purpose of such irrelevant details—the pewter plates, the glorious eggs—is to create what Roland Barthes called ‘the reality effect’.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023