Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
Spanish Inquisition

Spanish Inquisition

4 8.6
A court set up by the Spanish kings to find and punish people for not following Catholic beliefs
  • proper noun
translation icon : Inquisición Española
  • The Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) was set up by the Catholic Church in Spain.
  • Spanish Inquisition inquisitor
  • target of the Spanish Inquisition

There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors.

Examples

  • In 1531, the Spanish Inquisition was raging in Mexico.

    Blog text (10)

  • The Spanish Inquisition was notorious for its harsh persecution of those deemed heretical.

  • A prime target of the Spanish Inquisition was Jews who had converted.

    Academic text (2004)

  • The Spanish Inquisition gave the Jews in 1492 four months to convert, leave, or die.

    Blog text (25)

  • The Spanish Inquisition had made belief in pre-Columbian contact a heresy punishable by burning.

    Fiction book (1999)

  • During the Spanish Inquisition, many were tortured to extract confessions of heresy.

  • The Spanish Inquisition targeted individuals, including those who converted from Judaism, to enforce Catholic doctrine.

Synonyms

Inquisition
vsSpanish Inquisition
  • Literature
42 9.1

A church court that looks into and punishes people for their religious beliefs

is a later national tribunal created by a monarchy focusing on religious persecution

Surface Forms

Spanish Inquisition main

Morphology

Spanish + Inquisition

The meaning is directly compositional: 'Spanish' specifies the country/cultural origin and 'Inquisition' denotes a tribunal for prosecuting heresy, so a learner who knows both words can infer it refers to the historical Inquisition associated with Spain. This modifier + noun pattern is cross-linguistically common and does not require idiomatic knowledge, though detailed historical connotations may remain unknown to a B1 learner.

Etymology

Spanish Inquisition comes from the word inquisition, meaning an official 'questioning'. It was started by Spanish rulers in the late 1400s to find people who did not follow the Catholic faith, and because it used harsh trials and punishments the name now suggests a severe or unfair 'investigation'.