kafkaesque
/ˌkɑfkəˈʔɛsk/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.98 in modern English
30
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.
Example Sentences
- "Kafkaesque bureaucracies"
- "In the end, Jesus is not only a Kafkaesque, lonely, holy man, abandoned in his death and despised by his own people, but his teaching is not even considered to be like that of the Jewish Sages."
- "The world is increasingly becoming a Single Central Europe with its Kafkaesque anonymity, Musilesque human-traits-free individuality, or the divided individual without individuality and indivisibility, Orwellesque Newspeak and total control, if not manufacturing, of history."
- "Imagine a city like Los Angeles disappearing from the map completely. That's exactly what happened to Chaohu, a city in eastern China's Anhui province with a similar population — about 4 million. The people have remained, but the city has vanished in an administrative sleight of hand. That was the Kafkaesque reality for Chaohu's inhabitants, who went to bed one night and woke up the morning of Aug. 22 to find out that their city no longer existed. For many, their first inkling that something had changed was from the local news."
Etymology
Etymology tree English Kafka Proto-Indo-European *-iskos Proto-Germanic *-iskaz Proto-West Germanic *-iskbor. Vulgar Latin -iscus Italian -escobor. French -esquebor. English -esque English Kafkaesque From Kafka + -esque, after writer Franz Kafka. Piecewise doublet of Kafkaish.
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌkɑfkəˈʔɛsk/
- British English: /ˌkæfkəˈʔɛsk/
Inflected Forms
more Kafkaesque (comparative)
most Kafkaesque (superlative)