object lesson

object lesson noun: a lesson taught (especially to young children) using a familiar or unusual object as a focus.

Noun

object lesson (plural object lessons)

A lesson taught (especially to young children) using a familiar or unusual object as a focus.
An example from real life that explains a principle or teaches a lesson.
- Vertebrates are limited to two eyes each, but the variations they have played on this plain vanilla starting point are an object lesson in how much can be made from a little.2012, Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, page 107
Anything used as an example or lesson which serves to warn others as to the outcomes that result from a particular action or behavior, as exemplified by the fates of those who followed that course.
- Let that be an object lesson to him.
- Of the announcement, Osborne said: "They have spent a hundred billion pounds of public money and they've got a massive raspberry from everyone as far as I can see. As a PR exercise, it's been an object lesson in how not to make a government announcement."2021 December 1, “Network News: Integrated Rail Plan: Osborne predicts HS2 eastern leg will return”, in RAIL, number 945, page 8

ನಿದರ್ಶನಪರ ಪಾಠ, ದೃಷ್ಟಾಂತ ಪಾಠ

Yet China, like Russia, is now giving us an object lesson in the usefulness of having an open society, where strongmen don’t get to invent their own reality.2022 March 17, Paul Krugman, “Another Dictator Is Having a Bad Year”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.2022 October 25, Derek Thompson, “How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe”, in The Atlantic:

plural	object lessons

What does object lesson mean?: Object lesson means a lesson taught (especially to young children) using a familiar or unusual object as a focus.
What is object lesson in Kannada?: Object lesson in Kannada is ನಿದರ್ಶನಪರ ಪಾಠ, ದೃಷ್ಟಾಂತ ಪಾಠ. See Object lesson meaning in Kannada.
How do you use object lesson in a sentence?: Yet China, like Russia, is now giving us an object lesson in the usefulness of having an open society, where strongmen don’t get to invent their own reality.
What part of speech is object lesson?: Object lesson is a noun.
What is the plural of object lesson?: The plural of object lesson is object lessons.

Adapted from Wiktionary: object lesson (page history and authors); object lesson (Kannada Wiktionary) (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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