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lobotomy

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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WOTD – 30 March 2026
The dark patches in the frontal areas of the brain in this magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) radiogram of a man’s head indicate encephalomalacia (“a softening of the brain matter”), which is consistent with the patient having undergone lobotomies (sense 1) in the 1970s to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Etymology

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From lob(e) +‎ -otomy (a variant of -tomy (suffix denoting a surgical incision)).[1]

Pronunciation

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Noun

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lobotomy (plural lobotomies)

  2. (surgery, chiefly historical) A surgical operation involving cutting into a lobe of a body organ, specifically (neurosurgery), a procedure, now largely disused, involving severing connections between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamic region of the frontal lobe of the brain to treat certain mental illnesses.
    Synonym: leucotomy
    Hypernym: psychosurgery
    Coordinate terms: lobectomy, tractotomy
    • 2007 April, Julie Albrecht Royce, “Ghosts and Monsters of Lake Michigan—Haunting and Stalking the Sunset Coast”, in Traveling Michigan’s Sunset Coast: Exploring Michigan’s West Coat Beach Towns from New Buffalo to Mackinaw City, Holt, Mich.: Thunder Bay Press, →ISBN, part 2, page 420:
      Old psychiatric hospitals are even more frightening. They existed at a time in history when shock therapy, brain tissue manipulation, implants, drug experimentation and lobotomies were treatments de jour.
    1. An operation involving the severing of the sympathetic nerve trunk.
  3. (figurative) An act of removing or separating, and often disregarding or forgetting, something.
    • 1992, Bernadette Lynn Bosky, “Choice, Sacrifice, Destiny, and Nature in The Stand”, in Anthony Magistrale, editor, A Casebook on The Stand (Studies in Literary Criticism; 38), Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, →ISBN, page 135:
      As [Anthony] Magistrale has noted, evil in the fiction of Stephen King "can establish dominion only at the expense of the individual's moral conscience". Yet this conscience is a deep part of the soul; to silence it, characters must perform a kind of moral lobotomy, excising the best parts of themselves, until what is left becomes less than human.
    • 1998, Frans Meijers, Carrie Piggott, “Careers Guidance and Ethnic Minorities in Holland and Britain: Confronting Fear and Anger”, in Megan Crawford, Richard Edwards, Lesley Kidd, editors, Taking Issue: Debates in Guidance and Counselling in Learning, London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, part I (Ethics and Equity), page 51:
      Organisations which set out to treat all individuals as the same, or are 'colour-blind' in their philosophy, could be said to impose a form of cultural lobotomy on their clients, in denying the additional skills, knowledge and experience that they have as members of a minority culture.
      An edited version of an article previously published in the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling (1995), volume 23, number 1, pages 53–67.
    • 2001, Dana Villa, “Conclusion”, in Socratic Citizenship, Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 302:
      We hear a great deal about the need to cultivate civic virtue and a heightened sense of obligation, but rarely—if ever—are skepticism, conscientiousness, and intellectual honesty included among the list of virtues presented by those who would renew public life. It is as if civic engagement required a moral-intellectual lobotomy, the better to overcome doubts about the inherent goodness of the community, the moral worth of a given group identity, or the value of specific ideological commitment.
    • 2002 October, Ron Elsdon, “The Central Dilemma”, in Affiliation in the Workplace: Value Creation in the New Organization, Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, Greenwood Publishing Group, →ISBN, part I (Framing the Environment and Issues), page 21:
      Put another way, how can we avoid an ethical lobotomy in establishing an organizational perspective?
    • 2018 January, David Resnick, “Civic Education”, in Representing Education in Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings, and Issues, New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, →DOI, →ISBN, part II (A Movie Close-up on Educational Themes), page 13:
      In the end, as Levinson feared, the price of Charlie being accepted into normative school society is a kind of social lobotomy: he is tamed, so he is not really Charlie anymore.

Derived terms

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Translations

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surgical operation involving cutting into a lobe of a body organ, specifically a procedure involving severing connections between the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the frontal lobe of the brain

References

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  1. ^ “lobotomy, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2025; “lobotomy, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

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