Overlearn

//əʊvəˈləːn// verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To learn (something) more than is necessary; to study excessively, to take (something) too much to heart.

    "Why the rigmarole of a military survey before enacting a measure most Americans already favoured? Maybe he over-learned the lesson of the clobbering Bill Clinton got when he barged into this area right at the start of his presidency."

  2. 2
    To learn (something) to the point where responses become instinctive.
  3. 3
    Mostly when talking about neural networks, to learn a task to the point where responses actually start to degrade. Compare with overfit, in model tuning contexts.

Example

More examples

"Why the rigmarole of a military survey before enacting a measure most Americans already favoured? Maybe he over-learned the lesson of the clobbering Bill Clinton got when he barged into this area right at the start of his presidency."

Etymology

From over- + learn.

Related phrases

neural network

More for "overlearn"

SynonymsSentencesPronunciationTranslate

Next best steps

Find stronger synonymsSee usage examplesCheck pronunciationBrowse writing guides

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.