verb
Etymology
Origin of unteach
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
"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
With the intimacy avoiders—the screamers, she has to unteach them the bad habits first.
From Slate ● Nov. 5, 2013
Is not this to place him outside the conditions of existence, and to unteach him that liberty for which we pretend he is being prepared?...
From Crime and Its Causes by William Douglas Morrison
In previous strikes, a "no-detriment" policy was applied to prevent students being penalised and removing untaught topics from assessments.
From BBC ● Sep. 21, 2026
Advocates say that left untaught, teens and young adults may turn to questionable sources, such as TikTok or YouTube videos.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 10, 2023
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
Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me hopelessly dull; and, at first sight, all dull alike: but I soon found I was mistaken.
From "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë
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
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
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
Random Word
Spin the wheel and learn a new word!
Get a wordDefinitions 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.
