cultish

British

/ ˈkʌltɪ, ˈkʌltɪʃ /

adjective

intended to appeal to a small group of fashionable people

"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

Other Word Forms

cultishly adverb

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.

There is nothing cultish about a Nobel Prize winner.

From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 12, 2025

Last season, trapped inside Lumon's brutalist architecture and sanitised walls, crunching mysterious numbers for the "Macrodata Refinement team", the team was fed cultish Soviet-esque propaganda about company founder Kier Eagan and his family.

From BBC • Jan. 17, 2025

Heather Schwedel spent a week parading her Stanley cup around New York City to see if she could gain insight into its cultish following—and it did not go as planned.

From Slate • Jan. 26, 2024

Here’s the very California story of the man, the cultish product and the progressive company.

From Los Angeles Times • Aug. 23, 2023

Tesfaye's Tedros fits the original story's supposed examination of the cultish nature of fandom and the industry's ruthlessness in transforming that devotion into revenue.

From Salon • Jun. 5, 2023

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