means The belief that life, morality, and existence have no inherent meaning, value, or purpose.

from From Latin 'nihil,' meaning 'nothing,' which gives us a small family of negations — 'annihilate' (to reduce to nothing), 'nil,' even the gambling cry 'nihilist' of total loss. The '-ism' was bolted on to make a doctrine of it. The word gained its philosophical weight in 19th-century Russia, where it was popularized by Turgenev's 1862 novel 'Fathers and Sons' to describe a generation that rejected all received authority, faith, and tradition — though the term had drifted around European thought before that.