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''gestalt'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260124004559-00-⌔

gestalt - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

gestalt (plural gestalts or gestalten)

  • A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic elements that creates a whole, unified concept or pattern which is other than the sum of its parts due to the relationships between the parts (of a character, personality, entity, or being).
    • ✤ Mary did not approve of the Eleanor gestalt. “I been to Woonsocket S.D., Eleanor McGovern’s hometown,” she said, “and nobody there? I mean nobody? dresses like that.”1
    • ✤ Thus one activity, talking, is understood in terms of another, physical fighting. Structuring our experience in terms of such multidimensional gestalts is what makes our experience coherent.2
    • ✤ […] depending on the kinds of speech children hear directed to them, they may first learn unanalyzed “gestalts” (e.g., social expressions like “What’s that?” uttered as a single unit) instead of learning single words that are then freely recombined […]3
    • ✤ So different were our appearances and approaches and general gestalts that we had something of an epic rivalry from ‘74 through’77.4
    • ✤ The clusters of behavioral gestalten… the probability factors… the subtypes of crimes… the constellations of criminal subtypes…5
    • ✤ Obviously it was related to the entire gestalt of Simon’s polyphobia and compensatory counterphobia. The boys used to watch horror movies on late-night television […]6
    • ✤ “He [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] also said, ‘We’re making vaccinations available. We’re doing this for vaccination. We’re doing that for vaccination.’ So if you take the gestalt of it, the gestalt was, ‘Let’s get vaccinated!’”7

Etymology

Borrowed from German Gestalt (“shape, figure, form”).

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA: /ɡəˈʃtælt/, /ɡəˈʃtɑːlt/, /-ˈst-/
    • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (US) IPA: /ɡəˈʃtɔlt/, /ɡəˈstɔlt/

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1977, John L. Hess, Karen Hess, The Taste of America, New York: Grossman: ↩

  2. 1980, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, chapter 15, in Metaphors We Live By: ↩

  3. 1996, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, The Origins of Grammar, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: ↩

  4. 1998, David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1st Back Bay edition, Boston: Little, Brown and Co.: ↩

  5. 2003 August, Jay Kirk, “Watching the Detectives”, in Harpers Magazine ‎, volume 307, number 1839, page 61: ↩

  6. 2008, Jonathan Nasaw, Fear Itself: ↩

  7. 2025 March 6, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, quoting Bill Cassidy, “A Skeptical G.O.P. Senator Makes His Peace With Kennedy”, in The New York Times ‎, →ISSN: ↩

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