anomie

Will Shortz's New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle is a great favorite at our house. We do the puzzle while we're eating dinner or otherwise sitting around, and sometimes it takes us all week to get it done.

This week's puzzle asked for a six-letter word meaning "cultural instability." From where I pulled anomie I cannot say -- I was thinking that it sounded a lot like ennui but knew it didn't mean the same thing.

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Results of a Google search for "define:anomie."

• personal state of isolation and anxiety resulting from a lack of social control and regulation
• lack of moral standards in a society
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• Anomie, in contemporary English, means a condition of malaise in individuals, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values. ...
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie
• Alienation or social instability caused by erosion of standards and values
  en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anomie
• A state of normlessness in society, most commonly occurring during periods of dramatic social change.
  metta.spencer.name/acpapers/1999-sociological-studies-overview.html