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iconoclast

/aɪˌkɑnəˈklæst/
IPA guide

Other forms: iconoclasts

Are you always challenging the establishment? Or provoking popular thought by attacking traditions and institutions? Then you're definitely an iconoclast.

To be called an iconoclast today is usually kind of cool — they're rugged individualists, bold thinkers who don't give a hoot what tradition calls for. But back in medieval Greece, the iconoclasts had a more thuggish reputation. Stemming from the Greek words eikon, meaning "image," and klastes, meaning "breaker," an iconoclast was someone who destroyed religious sculptures and paintings.

Definitions of iconoclast
  1. noun
    someone who attacks cherished ideas or traditional institutions
    see moresee less
    type of:
    aggressor, assailant, assaulter, attacker
    someone who attacks
  2. noun
    a destroyer of images used in religious worship
    synonyms: image breaker
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    type of:
    destroyer, ruiner, undoer, uprooter, waster
    a person who destroys or ruins or lays waste to
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