Anathema
English Meaning
A ban or curse pronounced with religious solemnity by ecclesiastical authority, and accompanied by excommunication. Hence: Denunciation of anything as accursed.
- A formal ecclesiastical ban, curse, or excommunication.
- A vehement denunciation; a curse: "the sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue” ( Nathaniel Hawthorne).
- One that is cursed or damned.
- One that is greatly reviled, loathed, or shunned: "Essentialism—a belief in natural, immutable sex differences—is anathema to postmodernists, for whom sexuality itself, along with gender, is a 'social construct'” ( Wendy Kaminer).
