white terror
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.24 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Coordinated violence committed against (actual or imagined) socialists and their sympathizers.
Countable; Uncountable
name
Any one of several specific white terrors in history.
Example Sentences
- "I looked out the window of the former Grand Hotel de Pekin and thought of the days before World War II when I waltzed there with assorted Nazi, fascist and Scandinavian diplomats. On the street the slow‐moving bicycles moved silently where once I listened to the shuffling pad‐pad of camels bringing coal from Mentoukou. On these streets on Dec. 9, 1935, desperate Peking students had declared war on all kinds of fascism (so had I) and marched to break the “white terror,” as they called it."
Etymology
By analogy with red terror, with the "white" Thermidorian Reaction against the "red" reign of terror.