Fordistn.adj.
/ˈfɔːdɪst/, U.S. /ˈfɔrdəst/ Originally U.S.
A. n.
1. A driver or owner of a Ford motor car, esp. a first-time car owner (with reference to the affordability of early mass-produced Ford cars). Now chiefly historical.
ΚΠ
1913 Ford Times Nov. 66/1 The streets of Moscow, Odessa and St. Petersburg are alive with Fords... The average Russian, being a sensible man, enlists himself among the company of 'Fordists'—as they are called in Russia.
1919 Illustr. World May 422/2 For less than ten dollars the Fordist may now obtain for his car an entirely new section for the back, equipped with a long prosperous looking bevel glass window.
1927 M. Gold in Amer. Caravan 1 605 Fordist... I nevuh done him nuthin', didn't even run ovah him, officer, or nuthin'.
1971 R. Miller & B. McCalley From Here to Obscurity 12 The country tongue once typical among mid-western Fordists in the time of Model T.
2004 Automobile Q. 44 No. 4. 33/1 Owners became a close-knit clan, calling themselves ‘Fordists’.
2. An advocate of large-scale mechanized mass production; a proponent of Fordism.
ΚΠ
1935 A. Brown tr. D. S. Mirsky Intelligentsia of Great Brit. ii. 60 Wells cast democracy aside, and laid all his hopes on the enlightened capitalist type—Mond or Ford or the like... But Wells the Fordist grew to full stature only after the war.
1967 R. F. Kuisel Ernest Mercier v. 79 In April, 1927, the Communist union at the Citroën plant struck against the ‘Fordists’ who were trying to ‘dehumanize’ labor.
1984 New German Critique Fall 14 The assembly line, that other agent of the new which had been greeted with exuberant enthusiasm in the 1920s by Leninists and Fordists alike.
2004 W. R. Mead Power, Terror, Peace, & War (2005) vi. 100 The shade of the Boomers is even less hospitable to the growth of new Fordists among Gen X and Gen Y.
B. adj.
Of or relating to Henry Ford or the Ford Motor Company; spec. designating large-scale mechanized mass production of the type pioneered by Ford; of or relating to Fordism. Cf. post-Fordist adj.
ΘΚΠ
society > occupation and work > industry > manufacture or production > [adjective] > manufactured or produced > mass-produced
Fordist1916
production line1916
mass-produced1926
1916 Automobile 25 May 942/1 The original Fordist inducement was the sentiment: ‘We, too, can be motorists.’
1927 J. A. Hobson Conditions Industr. Peace ii. 41 The Fordist philosophy is not applicable to all cases, to none perhaps with the same force and pace as to the American automobile industry.
1968 D. Robinson Hollywood in Twenties 14 The Fordist streamlining of mass production.
1983 Econ. Geogr. 59 204 Since the 1960s, abundant evidence points to..a deepening crisis in the established Fordist systems.
2000 J. Caughie Television Drama v. 125 The most effective way..of streamlining and standardizing the production of mass art along the industrial lines of a Fordist model.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, June 2011; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.adj.1913