indoctrination
Americannoun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of indoctrination
Explanation
Indoctrination means teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs without questioning them. Your sister's orientation at her new job might seem more like indoctrination if she comes home robotically reciting her corporate employee handbook. Indoctrination often refers to religious ideas, when you're talking about a religious environment that doesn't let you question or criticize those beliefs. The Latin word for "teach," doctrina is the root of indoctrinate, and originally that's just what it meant. By the 1830s it came to mean the act of forcing ideas and opinions on someone who isn't allowed to question them.
Vocabulary lists containing indoctrination
Speak
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The Handmaid's Tale
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Son
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
A really good professor helps facilitate a world, not where you do an ideological indoctrination, but where you help students have to debate another side.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 7, 2026
Then came the “fantastic indoctrination into the West Coast scene,” Townshend says of hanging out with Jimi Hendrix and the Mamas and the Papas.
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 16, 2025
This means defending the university not as a corporate entity or site of theocratic indoctrination but as a democratic commons.
From Salon • Jun. 29, 2025
Nor is there any suggestion of indoctrination over social media.
From BBC • Jun. 13, 2025
In the other we have ordinary men, training, indoctrination, honor, glory, reputation, shame, loyalty, code, and believe in a cause.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
