overgeneralization

Noun

1. The act of overgeneralizing.
   • "George Orwell put the easy use of words like 'unique' under the headings of 'pretentious diction' and overgeneralization. - 1995 July 7, Gary Houston, “Everything's Unique”, in Chicago Reader:
   • Fortunately for all of us, the rhetoric of both cultural pessimism and postmodernism contains more than its fair share of exaggeration and overgeneralization. - 1988 November 11, Andrew Goodwin, “Reading: The Cultural...
2. An instance of overgeneralizing.
   • It's an overgeneralization to say that everywhere you look is the hand of man in the presettlement era," says Thomas Swetnam, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. - 2000 January 28, Keith Kloor,...