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unteach

American  
[uhn-teech] / ʌnˈtitʃ /

verb (used with object)

untaught, unteaching
  1. to cause to be forgotten or disbelieved, as by contrary teaching.

  2. to cause to forget or disbelieve something previously taught.


unteach British  
/ ʌnˈtiːtʃ /

verb

  1. to cause to disbelieve (teaching)

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Etymology

Origin of unteach

First recorded in 1525–35; un- 2 + teach

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:

As a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania, she’ll be on the front line of academics condemned to unteach Nolan’s heavily altered screenplay to students who will arrive quoting it chapter and verse.

From Los Angeles Times Aug. 4, 2026

“It’s exactly what I try to unteach physicians,” she said.

From New York Times Apr. 14, 2021

"You are not born a racist, it's taught by your parents, your environment, school. We want to unteach it, to use the same institutions reproducing stereotypes to turn them around."

From BBC Jul. 12, 2020

Whatever he learned in law school, no one could unteach him, whether he practiced or not.

From Seattle Times May 14, 2017

We do but learn, to-day, what our better advanced judgments will unteach to-morrow; and Aristotle doth but instruct us, as Plato did him, that is, to confute himself.

From Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend by Sir Thomas Browne

The very thing that this museum is about — the contributions of black people to U.S. society — has been untaught for so long that the truth remains elusive.

From Seattle Times Sep. 22, 2016

Weight machines, by design, entirely remove skill from the equation: They are intended to offer the untaught user a way to lift.

From The Wall Street Journal Jun. 10, 2016

Norfolk describes the local farmers as untrained, untaught amateur engineers and talented landscape architects, who cut drainage ditches, smooth fields and dam streams.

From Time Jul. 28, 2015

All your pretty girls are untaught: sister Lizzie, of course; Emma with her reading lists; imbecilic Catherine Morland.

From The Guardian Jan. 26, 2013

She didn’t tell him how others seemed simply to come to her untaught.

From "Gathering Blue" by Lois Lowry

After that Shorty returned to the bunk house, and the Virginian knew that the boy had learned his lesson of discontent from Trampas with a thoroughness past all unteaching.

From The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister

He says, "The conscientious study would be useful to humanity by teaching the use and unteaching the abuse of the Malthusian system, 536 whereby the family is duly limited to the necessities of society."

From The Life of Sir Richard Burton by Thomas Wright

Early impressions are the most lasting, and the hardest part of school work for the teacher is the unteaching of false ideas, and the correcting of imperfectly formed and partially understood ideas.

From Scientific American Supplement, No. 286, June 25, 1881 by Various

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