INQUISITION

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does Inquisition mean? 

• INQUISITION (noun)
  The noun INQUISITION has 2 senses:

1. a former tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church (1232-1820) created to discover and suppress heresy

2. a severe interrogation (often violating the rights or privacy of individuals)

  Familiarity information: INQUISITION used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• INQUISITION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A former tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church (1232-1820) created to discover and suppress heresy

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

Hypernyms ("Inquisition" is a kind of...):

court; judicature; tribunal (an assembly (including one or more judges) to conduct judicial business)

Instance hyponyms:

Spanish Inquisition (an inquisition initiated in 1478 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that guarded the orthodoxy of Catholicism in Spain (especially from the 15th to the 17th centuries))

Congregation of the Inquisition; Roman Inquisition (an inquisition set up in Italy in 1542 to curb the number of Protestants)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A severe interrogation (often violating the rights or privacy of individuals)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Hypernyms ("inquisition" is a kind of...):

examination; interrogation; interrogatory (formal systematic questioning)

 Context examples 

When I have returned you will be master of all the facts, and we can then better enter on our inquisition.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

I conjured him to conceal from all persons what I had told him of the Houyhnhnms; because the least hint of such a story would not only draw numbers of people to see me, but probably put me in danger of being imprisoned, or burnt by the Inquisition.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)