MEANING
1. To let go of knowledge or beliefs previously learned, rather than merely add new information.
2. To stop using a learned habit or response, often so that another can take its place.
Use it for
describing the reconsideration of inherited assumptions; explaining why learning may require abandoning an earlier belief; distinguishing revising a mental framework from accumulating factsDistinguishes relinquishing previously acquired knowledge or responses from simply adding new information. Writing functions: Analysis / Interpretation, Research / Methodology.
Words that belong together
- unlearn an assumption
- unlearn a belief
- unlearn what one was taught
On the page
Reading the letters required the historian to unlearn an account she had accepted from the official memoir.
The seminar asks students to examine what they may need to unlearn, not to reject established knowledge indiscriminately.
Interviewers had to unlearn the habit of completing participants’ sentences.
A new procedure is difficult to adopt when staff must first unlearn an automatic sequence of actions.
Word forms
- Base
- unlearn
- Past tense
- unlearned
- Past participle
- unlearned
- Present participle
- unlearning
Full tense & aspect guide
- Present
- unlearn
- Present continuous
- am/is/are unlearning
- Present perfect
- have/has unlearned
- Present perfect continuous
- have/has been unlearning
- Past
- unlearned
- Past continuous
- was/were unlearning
- Past perfect
- had unlearned
- Past perfect continuous
- had been unlearning
- Future
- will unlearn
- Future continuous
- will be unlearning
- Future perfect
- will have unlearned
- Future perfect continuous
- will have been unlearning
Choose the auxiliary that agrees with your subject. These are constructions of one word, not separate entries.
Usage notes
Transitive verb: unlearns, unlearned, unlearned, unlearning; future will unlearn. British unlearnt also occurs. Unlearn an assumption, habit, or way of doing something. Register: neutral. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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