noun
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a policy or programme of censoring
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the act or system of censoring
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psychoanal the activity of the mind in regulating impulses, etc, from the unconscious so that they are modified before reaching the conscious mind
Other Word Forms
- anticensorship adjective
- precensorship noun
- procensorship adjective
- self-censorship noun
Etymology
Origin of censorship
Explanation
Censorship blocks something from being read, heard, or seen. If you've ever heard the sound of bleeping when someone is speaking on television, that's censorship. To "censor" is to review something and to choose to remove or hide parts of it that are considered unacceptable. Censorship is the name for the process or idea of keeping things like obscene word or graphic images from an audience. There is also such a thing as self-censorship, which is when you refrain from saying certain things — or possibly re-wording them — depending on who is listening.
Vocabulary lists containing censorship
List 5
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Unit 2: Pivotal Words and Phrases
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World War I
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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.
Last year, a team of European scientists compressed DeepSeek R1, stripped the censorship from the model entirely, and found that the underlying system answered freely about every topic Beijing had tried to suppress.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 13, 2026
The response from app designers could be swift and dramatic: Think universal TikTok-style censorship and aughts-era chronological scroll, experts said.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 28, 2026
NordVPN also offers obfuscated servers to bypass censorship, Double VPN for routing traffic through two encrypted servers and Onion over VPN for Tor-like anonymity.
From Salon • Mar. 27, 2026
In the current climate of censorship and the strain imposed by war it is impossible to gauge how much popular support there is for regime change.
From BBC • Mar. 25, 2026
Liberated from censorship and the need to be inventive, they proceeded cautiously.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
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.
