Word.ws English Dictionary

hearts and minds

hearts and minds noun: people's private feelings and emotions, now especially those of a local population towards an invading or occupying military force.

Noun

hearts and minds pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) People's private feelings and emotions, now especially those of a local population towards an invading or occupying military force.
    • As experienced political officers, Sir William Macnaghten and Sir Alexander Burnes should have been aware of what was going on in Afghan hearts and minds, but relations between the two men had become badly strained.1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society, published 2010, page 211
    • apart from road patrols they worked with the infantry and SAS, patrolled rivers in canoes, and carried out 'hearts & minds' programmes in the villages.2006, Will Fowler, Britain's Secret War: The Indonesian Confrontation 1962-66, Osprey Publishing, page 15

Examples of hearts and minds in a sentence

  • Unlike in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, in Yemen they are trying to implement sharia by winning over the hearts and minds of the people.2012 April 30, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, “Al-Qaida's wretched utopia and the battle for hearts and minds”, in The Guardian:
  • In defense of moderation, he proposed simply stomping out religious radicals. (In American terms: shock and awe, rather than hearts and minds.)2018 November 3, Hassan Hassan, “The Arab Winter Is Coming”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 03 Nov 2018:

Origin of hearts and minds

From the idea that one needs to persuade people, that is, to win their hearts and change their minds.

Questions about hearts and minds

What does hearts and minds mean?
Hearts and minds means people's private feelings and emotions, now especially those of a local population towards an invading or occupying military force.
How do you use hearts and minds in a sentence?
Unlike in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, in Yemen they are trying to implement sharia by winning over the hearts and minds of the people.
What part of speech is hearts and minds?
Hearts and minds is a noun.

Words near hearts and minds in the dictionary

  1. heartrending
  2. heartrendingly
  3. heartrot
  4. hearts
  5. hearts and flowers
  6. hearts and minds
  7. hearts and rounds
  8. hearts of glass
  9. hearts of gold
  10. hearts of hearts
  11. hearts of oak

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hearts and minds (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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