1
as in dissenters
a person who believes, teaches, or advocates something opposed to accepted beliefs
Galileo was condemned as a heretic for supporting Copernicus's thesis that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
2
as in mavericks
a person who does not conform to generally accepted standards or customs
he's the ultimate heretic: a Yankees fan living deep in the heart of the Red Sox Nation
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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
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Recent Examples of heretics
Among those applauding at the end was Carmen Chaplin, one of the director’s granddaughters, and even heretics, whose faith in Chaplin is fickle, will have been swept along.
—
Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for heretics
Noun
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What’s safe for Jews was itself a matter of disagreement among the bill’s backers and dissenters.—
CalMatters,
Mercury News,
14 Oct. 2025
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Jerusalem — On a hot Friday morning in September, dozens of Israelis turned up at Gaza’s border fence – not as soldiers, but as dissenters.—
Zeena Saifi,
CNN Money,
5 Oct. 2025
Noun
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Jazz is an art form with an outsized share of mavericks, rebels, and creative dissidents who’ve built careers by blazing their own particular paths.—
Andrew Gilbert,
Mercury News,
19 Sep. 2025
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Thinkers, surveyors, and religious mavericks, the House of Pynchon had settled into middle-class respectability by the time this Thomas Ruggles Pynchon was born.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
5 Aug. 2025
Noun
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Five other members of the ring were jailed for a total of about 40 years, all accused of gathering detailed information on journalists, dissidents and Ukrainian soldiers being trained at a US military base in Germany.—
Nick Paton Walsh,
CNN Money,
16 Oct. 2025
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Also not fitting the West’s preconceptions was the fact that most Soviet dissidents didn’t reject socialism.—
Matthew Wills,
JSTOR Daily,
3 Oct. 2025
Noun
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Both men were iconoclasts who took MTV’s money and ran with it, adopting a collage approach to the news in which information was conveyed to the audience without the intermediary of an anchor or host, often with cuts that allowed shots to play out for only a fraction of a second.—
Jim Hemphill,
IndieWire,
16 Oct. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Heretics.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/heretics. Accessed 29 Oct. 2025.
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