wrongthink
wrongthink noun: beliefs or opinions that run contrary to the prevailing or mainstream orthodoxy.
Noun
wrongthink (usually uncountable, plural wrongthinks)
- Beliefs or opinions that run contrary to the prevailing or mainstream orthodoxy.
- In other words I spent yesterday in bed with a headache not merely because of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers and wrongthink, but because both my grandmothers had migraine, my father has migraine and my mother has migraine.1979, Joan Didion, The White Album
- The third, and most grievous of all the wrongthinks, is suggesting that men and women are, in general, physiologically and psychologically different from each other, and thus they tend to excel at different things.2017 August 8, Ben Domenech, “Could This Man Work At Google?”, in The Federalist
- Synonyms:
- badthink, crimethink, wrongthought
Verb
wrongthink (third-person singular simple present wrongthinks, present participle wrongthinking, simple past and past participle wrongthought)
- To engage in wrongthink.
- Post a conservative story on Facebook or search for it on Google and out pops Snopes, a partisan site, to warn you of wrongthinking.2017 June 30, Henry Wolff, “The Freedom Center Beats the Southern Poverty Law Center”, in American Renaissance
- Hasbro has sent a clear signal to men, to Trump supporters, and to anyone who wrongthinks: you are not welcome, and we will purge you.2017 December 21, Ganker, “A joke, a media storm, and a destroyed life... Is ‘Magic: The Gathering’ the next Gamergate?”, in Ganker
Examples of wrongthink in a sentence
- Fang, fearing for his job, had to issue a Maoist-style apology for reporting wrongthink.2020 November 6, David Bernstein, “The Revolution is Eating its Own”, in The Volokh Conspiracy:
- Wrongthinking friends are kicked off of PayPal and Etsy and Twitter, of course, with increasing frequency.2022 June 13, Abigail Shrier, “Welcome to the Party, Pal”, in The Truth Fairy:
Synonyms of wrongthink
Forms of wrongthink
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | wrongthinks |
| alternative form | wrong-think |
| alternative form | wrong think |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | wrongthinks |
| present participle | wrongthinking |
| past participle | wrongthought |
| past | wrongthought |
Origin of wrongthink
Compound of wrong + think, probably modelled on earlier crimethink from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Words formed from wrongthink
Questions about wrongthink
- What does wrongthink mean?
- Wrongthink means beliefs or opinions that run contrary to the prevailing or mainstream orthodoxy.
- How do you use wrongthink in a sentence?
- Fang, fearing for his job, had to issue a Maoist-style apology for reporting wrongthink.
- What part of speech is wrongthink?
- Wrongthink can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of wrongthink?
- The plural of wrongthink is wrongthinks.
Words near wrongthink in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wrongthink (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:
Cite this entry: “wrongthink.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wrongthink. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.