didactic
adjective
Richard C. LeineckerRobert B. HeilmanKirkus ReviewsPaul Lewis
Did you know?
We Will Teach You the Origin of Didactic
Didaktikós is a Greek word that means "apt at teaching." It comes from didáskein, meaning "to teach." Something didactic does just that: it teaches or instructs. Didactic conveyed that neutral meaning when it was first borrowed in the 17th century, and still does; a didactic piece of writing is one that is meant to be instructive as well as artistic. Parables are generally didactic because they aim to teach a moral lesson. Didactic now sometimes has negative connotations, too, however. Something described as "didactic" is often overburdened with instruction to the point of being dull. Or it might be pompously instructive or moralistic.
Examples of didactic in a Sentence
Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past, 1993
For two decades, many Americans, including some early advocates of the Vietnam intervention, have been relentlessly didactic, extracting cautionary lessons from Vietnam.
—George F. Will, Newsweek, 22 May 1989
—the trappings, one might say—of a didactic and resolutely pious Victorian sensibility in the service of an anarchic imagination.
—Joyce Carol Oates, The Profane Art, 1983
the poet's works became increasingly didactic after his religious conversion
Arash Azizi, The Atlantic, 22 Oct. 2025
It was considered immoral to lie and the whole point of writing things down back then was to increase morality and improve society, so there really is no didactic history of forgery.
—JSTOR Daily, 16 Oct. 2025
Adapted from his own novel Cabal, Barker brings so much creativity and personality to this story that could easily have become a more didactic sermon about otherness.
—Samantha Allen, Them., 7 Oct. 2025
This simple didactic framework was picked up by Tetlock and used to characterize different approaches that expert forecasters took to the task of prediction.
—Marcus Weldon, MSNBC Newsweek, 22 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for didactic
Cite this Entry
“Didactic.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/didactic. Accessed 31 Oct. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
didactic
adjective
Medical Definition
didactic
adjective
Share