Rite of passage is a celebration of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society. In cultural anthropology the term is the Anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage, "Rites of Passage." The term is now fully adopted into anthropology as well as into the literature and popular cultures of many modern languages.

A rite of passage is a ritual that marks a change in a person's social or sexual status.