Word.ws English Dictionary

thought reform

thought reform noun: individual ideological indoctrination, especially that conducted in Communist China under Mao Zedong.

Noun

thought reform (uncountable)

  1. Individual ideological indoctrination, especially that conducted in Communist China under Mao Zedong.
    • Although working prisoners to exhaustion was apparently not part of thought reform procedures, hard labor is well known to have been utilized in prisons and concentration camps elsewhere.1986, Lewis Okun, Woman Abuse: Facts Replacing Myths, page 132
    • As a group, they could not show as wide a spectrum of responses to thought reform as the Westerners whom I interviewed, for they were all essentially thought reform failures.2012, Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, page 248

Questions about thought reform

What does thought reform mean?
Thought reform means individual ideological indoctrination, especially that conducted in Communist China under Mao Zedong.
What part of speech is thought reform?
Thought reform is a noun.

Words near thought reform in the dictionary

  1. thought piece
  2. thought pieces
  3. thought police
  4. thought process
  5. thought processes
  6. thought reform
  7. thought shower
  8. thought showers
  9. thought straight
  10. thought the sun shined out of someone's arse
  11. thought the sun shined out of someone's ass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thought reform (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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