indoctrination
Americannoun
Other Word 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.
It’s a piece of working Party doctrine—Xi unveiled it in 2017 and made it the centerpiece of an indoctrination campaign every cadre had to recite.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 19, 2026
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
The discomfort may not necessarily seek to compel indoctrination, but it does erase the existence of lives, truths, and histories some would rather forget or disappear.
From Slate ● Apr. 23, 2025
He had been my teacher during my period of indoctrination and now I realized that I shouldn't have come.
From "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
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.
