Kafkaesque

adj
/ˌkæfkəˈʔɛsk/UK/ˌkɑfkəˈʔɛsk/US

Etymology

From Kafka + -esque, after writer Franz Kafka. Piecewise doublet of Kafkaish.

  1. derived from *kavъka
  2. borrowed from Kafka
  3. suffixed as kafkaesque — “Kafka + esque

Definitions

  1. Marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.

    • 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.
  2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of looming danger.

  3. In the manner of something written by Franz Kafka.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for Kafkaesque. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA