Disciplinist
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A proponent of disciplinism. historical
"Or, to put the three views concretely, the formal disciplinist would say that training the reasoning power by mathematics would make one a better lawyer or medical diagnostician; the non-transferrist would say that training in geometry helped geometry but had nothing to do with, say, trigonometry, except in so far as you used identical factors in both; and the inductionist would grant a slight transfer from one form of mathematics to a similar form, regardless of a common element, while denying any appreciable spread to legal reasoning or medical diagnosis."
- 2 A disciplinarian; one who stresses obedience to authority.
"La Trappe, a Frenchman, was a gloomy disciplinist and recluse, and a founder of a set of devotees, who are obliged to live in the practice of the utmost austerities, and without ever speaking to each other."
- 3 One whose job is to enforce discipline.
"The prison disciplinist, Jno. Clay, of Preston, claims to be descended from the third sone of Richard Clay, of the Hill, who had five sons and three daughters."
Example
More examples"Or, to put the three views concretely, the formal disciplinist would say that training the reasoning power by mathematics would make one a better lawyer or medical diagnostician; the non-transferrist would say that training in geometry helped geometry but had nothing to do with, say, trigonometry, except in so far as you used identical factors in both; and the inductionist would grant a slight transfer from one form of mathematics to a similar form, regardless of a common element, while denying any appreciable spread to legal reasoning or medical diagnosis."
Etymology
From discipline + -ist.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.