stereotype

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)A conventional, formulaic, and often oversimplified or exaggerated conception, opinion, or image of (a person or a group of people).

   “Not all Zumbetonians wear plimsolls. That's just a stereotype.”

   “Instead we notice a trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads.”

   “Anthropologists studying aid agencies have found that stereotypes and deindividualization are endemic among those in refugee work. It may be inevitable that large assistance organizations tend to objectify, simplify, and universalize the people under their care.”

   “So, although to some observers machine music implies a harsh metronomicity – and some sectors of electronic dance music might be the stereotype here – computers can also be the means of investigating human expression.”

2. (countable, uncountable)A person who is regarded as embodying or conforming to a set image or type.
3. (countable, uncountable)A metal printing plate cast from a matrix moulded from a raised printing surface.
4. (countable, uncountable)An extensibility mechanism of the Unified Modeling Language, allowing a new element to be derived from an existing one with added specializations.

verb

1. (transitive)To make a stereotype of someone or something, or characterize someone by a stereotype.

   “Unable to ascertain what is in the minds of so many individuals, he must try to simplify his problems by eliminating individual differences: he must try to control and stereotype interests and beliefs by education and propaganda.”

   “The heroines of these plays speak out against intraracial biases, stereotyping, lynchmobs, illiteracy, poverty, promiscuity, self-righteousness, verbally abusive men, rape, and miscegenation. […] Without warning the doctor, she chokes the life out of her child in order to keep him safe from white lynchmobs.”

2. (transitive)To prepare for printing in stereotype; to produce stereotype plates of.

   “to stereotype the Bible”

3. (transitive)To print from a stereotype.
4. (figuratively, transitive)To make firm or permanent; to fix.

   “Powerful causes tending to stereotype and aggravate the poverty of old conditions.”

adj

1. Of an edition: printed in stereotype.

   “At the present Epoch (1800), the art of Printing is become rather retrograde; or we should not hear so much of Stereotype editions. Surely the use and very principle of the invention of Printing, is to have the types moveable!”

   “Yet the whole of this mighty preparation ended in the production of a small stereotype edition of the New Testament, without the usual distinction of verses, and nearly without notes.”

   “The first edition of this work, (the constant and increasing sale of which proves the high esteem in which it is deservedly held), begun in 1788, and published in London, in numbers, consisted of 5,000 copies; the second in 1805, of 2,000; the third in 1810, of 2,000; the fourth in 1812, of 3,000; and the new edition is stereotype, the largest work ever submitted to that process.”

2. (figuratively, rare)Synonym of stereotyped.

   “It is an ingenious expression which I owe to you, sir, that the manners of the East are as it were stereotype. Ahhough I do not conceive that they are quite so strongly marked, yet, to make my idea understood, I would say that they are like the last impressions taken from a copper-plate engraving, where the whole of the subject to be represented is made out, although parts of it from much use have been obliterated.”

   “Cartels by the hundred: which he, since the Constitution must be made first, and his time is precious, answers now always with a kind of stereotype formula: ‘Monsieur, you are put upon my List; but I warn you that it is long, and I grant no preferences.’”

   “This wonderful passage, with its piercing tenderness and solemn eloquence, is—one shrinks from saying it—a veritable mosaic of stereotype ideas, characteristic of this particular kind of ‘epilogus,’ or [‘]consolatio,’ as a few illustrations out of many will show.”

   “The posture of the body is very straight with the preserved arm hanging straight down at the side. The body is of the well-known athletic type, that, by no means, is stereotype in its proportions. In the Old Kingdom for example, the shoulders are straighter and normally so broad that the arms hanging down do not even touch the body.”