Word.ws English Dictionary

brain-washing

brain-washing is the alternative form of brainwashing.

Meaning of brainwashing

Noun

brainwashing (countable and uncountable, plural brainwashings)

  1. A form of indoctrination that forces people to abandon their beliefs in favour of another set of beliefs by conditioning through various forms of pressure or torture.
    • So it came about, through Pavlov's work, that the Soviets developed and perfected the 'brain-washing' technique seen to be so effective in the state trials of the 1930s. An amazed world witnessed the sight of intelligent and renowned figures genuinely confessing to criminal acts against the state...1994, David Lawrence Pedersen, Cameral Analysis: A Method of Treating the Psychoneurosis Using Hypnosis, page 96

Forms of brain-washing

pluralbrain-washings

Questions about brain-washing

What is brain-washing the alternative form of?
Brain-washing is the alternative form of brainwashing.

Words near brain-washing in the dictionary

  1. brain-tickler
  2. brain-ticklers
  3. brain-wash
  4. brain-washed
  5. brain-washes
  6. brain-washing
  7. brain-washings
  8. brain-worm
  9. brain-wormed
  10. brain-worms
  11. brainache

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brain-washing (page history and authors); brainwashing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “brain-washing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brain-washing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.