individualist
Americannoun
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a person who shows great independence or individuality in thought or action.
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an advocate of individualism.
noun
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a person who shows independence and individuality in his behaviour, opinions, or actions
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an advocate of individualism
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of individualist
First recorded in 1830–40; individual + -ist
Explanation
If you’re an individualist, you think for yourself and do things your own way — you have the individualist values of independence and creativity. It is great to be an individualist, meaning you won't conform to social pressures — that is, unless a group of individualists is trying to come to mutual agreement about something. You may have heard of bands that break up because "creative differences" make them unable to write music together. Most likely, those differences are the result of individualist attitudes about how the music should sound.
Vocabulary lists containing individualist
The Age of Jackson and Westward Expansion, Lessons 3–5
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Essential Question Vocabulary (Unit 2)
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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.
“It’s unclear how much weight the market will put on individual data points,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of U.S. rates strategy at TD Securities in New York, who follows the bond market.
From MarketWatch • Nov. 16, 2025
Martin Kocher, the new Austrian central-bank governor who has been in the role since September, argued earlier this month that rate setters shouldn’t be too influenced by individual data points.
From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 27, 2025
Unfortunately, machine learning systems focus on individual data points, and thus do not provide scientists with the kinds of uncertainty assessments that they care about.
From Science Daily • Nov. 9, 2023
The more summary statistics published about a dataset, the more potential there is to reverse-engineer the individual data points.
From Slate • Mar. 7, 2022
Since we do not know the individual data values, we can instead find the midpoint of each interval.
From Textbooks • Mar. 27, 2020
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.
