1. A formal ecclesiastical ban, curse, or excommunication.
2. A vehement denunciation; a curse: “the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue”(Nathaniel Hawthorne).
3. One that is cursed or damned.
4. One that is greatly reviled, loathed, or shunned: “Essentialisma belief in natural, immutable sex differencesis anathema to postmodernists, for whom sexuality itself, along with gender, is a ‘social construct’”(Wendy Kaminer).
[Late Latin anathema, doomed offering, accursed thing, from Greek, from anatithenai, anathe-, to dedicate : ana-, ana- + tithenai, to put; see dh- in Indo-European roots.]
-n
th
a belief in natural, immutable sex differences
- in Indo-European roots.]
