Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To put (something learned) out of the mind; forget.
  • transitive verb To undo the effect of; put aside the practice of.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To discard, put away, or get rid of (what one has learned); forget the knowledge of.
  • To fail to learn; not to learn.
  • To put away acquired knowledge; become ignorant.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To forget, as what has been learned; to lose from memory; also, to learn the contrary of.
  • transitive verb obsolete To fail to learn.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb transitive To discard the knowledge of.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb try to forget; put out of one's memory or knowledge
  • verb discard something previously learnt, like an old habit

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From un- +‎ learn.

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Examples

Comments

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  • You often hear jazz or rock musicians say that they needed to "unlearn" classical forms in order to experiment with improvisation or different melodic structures. Interesting concept...

    October 22, 2007

  • Unlearning is needed to excel in a lot of fields, because it leads to "thinking outside the box." See also: deprogramming for a related concept of mind-renewal.

    October 23, 2007

  • Yoda wanted Luke to do this when he was training.

    June 18, 2012