fandom
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of fandom
Explanation
Use the word fandom to talk about the community of people who admire a particular celebrity, hero, sports team, or TV show. If you are president of the Boston Red Sox fan club, you're part of the team's fandom. Your favorite boy band might have a fandom that consists mainly of screaming pre-teens, while National Public Radio's fandom is probably mostly middle aged. If you are a fan of a singer or a series of comic books, you can say you belong to their fandom. The word has been around since the very early twentieth century, from fan, a baseball slang abbreviation of fanatic, which comes from the Latin fanaticus, "mad, or inspired by a god."
Vocabulary lists containing fandom
-dom and -hood
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A Hero's Guide to Summer Vacation
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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.
Still, the U.S. lags behind much of the world as a market for soccer fandom.
From MarketWatch • Jun. 9, 2026
New York hasn’t seen this level of basketball fandom since the 2012 days of “Linsanity,” when guard Jeremy Lin suddenly started scoring baskets for the Knicks at an unfathomable rate.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 7, 2026
The long life of the Declaration of Independence, wartime survival in Ukraine, the joy of soccer fandom, early human societies and more.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 1, 2026
However it was Stranger Things, which began in 2016 when Matarazzo was 13 years old, that catapulted him into the sci-fi fandom relm.
From BBC • May 19, 2026
When I draw, it’s almost always fandom stuff.
From "Leah on the Offbeat" by Becky Albertalli
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.
