self-definition
Americannoun
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self-definitions
plural
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the act or process of defining or identifying one's own character, purpose, role, etc.
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the description used by someone to define or identify their own character, purpose, role, etc.
Other Word Forms
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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.
See Examples For:
Not to do so is to outsource the right’s self-definition to the most vile and discrediting.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2025
In those initial steps of self-definition, deconstructing the political and religious maps I’d grown up with, I had feared my parents’ disappointment.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 11, 2024
This is not about identity politics but ennui: Even minuscule choices, like what socks to wear, are part of a larger cultural self-definition and viral conversation.
From Slate ● Aug. 3, 2024
His explorations of identity and self-definition, of the importance of the oral tradition in literature, and of his Kiowa heritage were interwoven with reverent evocations of landscape in passages of soaring lyrical prose.
From New York Times ● Jan. 29, 2024
Education will be part of the continuous self-definition of the human being throughout one's entire life.
From The Civilization of Illiteracy by Mihai Nadin
A shorts program about re-evaluating masculinity, “Boys Beyond Boundaries,” which was new last year, has returned with films like Christina Willings’s Canadian documentary “Beauty,” featuring five children whose self-definitions don’t match their birth certificates.
From New York Times ● Feb. 14, 2019
And he made many of those self-definitions, sometimes it seemed for the sake of defiance or attention itself, from ages 22 to 25.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 4, 2016
It no longer existed for good reasons, including the fortunate demise of the narrow self-definitions and exclusions on which it ran.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 3, 2015
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.
