PLURALIST

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does pluralist mean? 

• PLURALIST (noun)
  The noun PLURALIST has 3 senses:

1. a cleric who holds more than one benefice at a time

2. a philosopher who believes that no single explanation can account for all the phenomena of nature

3. someone who believes that distinct ethnic or cultural or religious groups can exist together in society

  Familiarity information: PLURALIST used as a noun is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PLURALIST (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A cleric who holds more than one benefice at a time

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Hypernyms ("pluralist" is a kind of...):

churchman; cleric; divine; ecclesiastic (a clergyman or other person in religious orders)

Derivation:

pluralism (the practice of one person holding more than one benefice at a time)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A philosopher who believes that no single explanation can account for all the phenomena of nature

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Hypernyms ("pluralist" is a kind of...):

philosopher (a specialist in philosophy)

Derivation:

pluralism (the doctrine that reality consists of several basic substances or elements)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Someone who believes that distinct ethnic or cultural or religious groups can exist together in society

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Hypernyms ("pluralist" is a kind of...):

liberal; liberalist; progressive (a person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties)

Derivation:

pluralism (a social organization in which diversity of racial or religious or ethnic or cultural groups is tolerated)

 Context examples 

That perhaps it was a little indecent that the principal registrar of all, whose duty it was to find the public, constantly resorting to this place, all needful accommodation, should be an enormous sinecurist in virtue of that post (and might be, besides, a clergyman, a pluralist, the holder of a staff in a cathedral, and what not),—while the public was put to the inconvenience of which we had a specimen every afternoon when the office was busy, and which we knew to be quite monstrous.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)