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psyop

American  
[sahy-ahp] / ˈsaɪˌɑp /

noun

  • psyops
    plural
  1. a military operation that uses psychological techniques to weaken, demoralize, or otherwise gain an advantage over an enemy or adversary: also, the use of such techniques domestically.

  2. something, especially a famous person or social media campaign that is used to change or shape the attitudes of the public.


Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms


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.

See Examples For:

In the age of the internet and social media this type of propaganda campaign and psyop is much more powerful than even master Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels could have imagined in the 1940s and 1930s.

From Salon ● Jun. 3, 2024

“From a tactical level, the psyop mission is extremely hard to show and tell,” said Lt.

From Seattle Times ● May 1, 2024

In fact, about six months after the first video was released, the command began surveying soldiers who applied for the psyop mission and got into the assessment and selection course.

From Seattle Times ● May 1, 2024

Whether kissing Raquel was a diabolical cover to distract from his best friend's affair, a nasty psyop against his ex, or just a routine, drunken lack of impulse control doesn't really matter.

From Salon ● May 26, 2023

“Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”

From The Guardian ● Feb. 26, 2017

And so started the psyops campaign against women’s body hair a hundred years ago, for the same profitable reason.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 3, 2026

There is no way to engage productively with psyops — you can't have a reasonable conversation with someone who is telling you that you are stupid or morally defective.

From Salon ● Aug. 18, 2024

It’s particularly difficult for psyops soldiers, whose work is often less visible than that of the more celebrated Army commandos and not always understood.

From Seattle Times ● May 1, 2024

Farrow can be disarmingly wry — “I knew my way around a paternity rumor” — even when writing about another shadowy psyops firm spying on him and other journalists.

From New York Times ● Oct. 11, 2019

What if Russia had read its psyops data wrong and pivoted its resources to Snapchat?

From Washington Post ● Nov. 8, 2017

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