Dictionary

unhabituate en · VERB

Etymology

From un- + habituate.

Meanings

1. To reverse or overcome the effects of habituation.
   • Almost immediately in their legal education, they are habituated to a certain way of thinking about law, and the role I see myself as having here besides habituating them to think about law in that way is to unhabituate them to thinking about law in those sorts of ways. 1996, Paul F. Campos, Pierre Schlag, Steven Douglas Smith, Against the Law, page 141:
   • Learning to “see” around these strategies and unhabituate the reader's eye is more about selectively recentering demoted experiences than transparently reproducing foregrounded historiographical “rescue attempts.” 2018, Stephen R. Davis, The ANC's War against Apartheid:
   • It is in loneliness and retirement — the solitude which unhabituates men to that sharp definiteness of thought which is needful for its expression to another, in the seasons of mist and gloom, which make external nature no scene for the wanton eye to revel in the contemplation of, in the absence of the beautifully elaborated forms of art, and amid such prospects of nature as engender dim and indefinite feelings in the heart, rather than present distinctly outlined images for the eye and the fancy ; 1841, Francis Whaley Harper, The powers of the Greek tenses, and other papers, pages 8–9:

Forms