Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A statement that is obviously true or that is often presented as true: synonym: cliché.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An undoubted or self-evident truth.
  • noun Synonyms Aphorism, Axiom, Maxim, etc. See aphorism.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An undoubted or self-evident truth; a statement which is pliantly true; a proposition needing no proof or argument; -- opposed to falsism.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A self-evident or obvious truth.
  • noun A banality or cliché.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an obvious truth

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Unfortunately, it has come to a point that a good test of a political "truism" is that, if a partisan Republican running for or holding office proclaims it, it is probably not true.

    Send in the Clowns 2010

  • By the way, one truism is that people in the popular media tend to view a large number of job losses as more newsworthy than an equivalent number of job additions, particularly if the former are concentrated in some way (in a particular firm, industry, locale, or so on).

    Matthew Yglesias » What’s Not the Matter With American Manufacturing 2009

  • And, we realized the old truism from the original cytogenetics which was that the telomere is really important for protecting ends and, as you might expect, the cell actually devotes all sorts of machinery to make sure that never goes wrong, or goes wrong as little as possible.

    Elizabeth H. Blackburn - Interview 2009

  • The truism is that "correlation is not causation."

    June 17th, 2009 m_francis 2009

  • It made no sense for anyone to say this to me because *I* was proof that the "truism" -- or some kind of "ism", anyway -- was crap.

    Guest Author Blog Post: Kelly Link Author of Pretty Monsters Cindy 2010

  • And in spite of the obvious leaps beyond reality that shows like “Law & Order” take, one thing that is a truism is the cozy relationship between the police, district attorneys and judges.

    Archive 2008-04-01 2008

  • And in spite of the obvious leaps beyond reality that shows like “Law & Order” take, one thing that is a truism is the cozy relationship between the police, district attorneys and judges.

    Of Course... 2008

  • Before deciding what course to take, Mr. Cameron should recall a truism borne out by the darker chapters of Britain's long island story, including its lack of European allies when the American colonies rebelled or Neville Chamberlain's near-disastrous attempt to stand aloof from the continent in the 1930s.

    The Dis-Uniting Kingdom? Hugo Brady 2009

  • Besides the surface record as depicted by the climate science orthodoxy, another truism is the depicted record of Arctic sea ice extent.

    Hansen and the "Destruction of Creation" « Climate Audit 2007

  • As I say, this is a truism, but, in our avid search for originality, it is sometimes forgotten that a truism is also true.

    Financial Industry Restructuring: A User's Guide 1985

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