Dorothy, travelling, embraces local's neat established thinking (9)
I believe the answer is:
orthodoxy
'established thinking' is the definition.
The answer and definition can be both related to thinking as well as being singular nouns.
Perhaps you can see an association between them that I can't see?
'dorothy travelling embraces local's neat' is the wordplay.
I cannot really understand how this works, but
'neat' could be 'ox' (neat historically meant a cow or ox) and 'ox' is found in the answer.
an anagram of 'dorothy' is 'orthody' which is located in the remaining letters.
This accounts for all the letters.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for orthodoxy that I've seen before include "Position of agreement with conventional standards" , "Conformity" , "Accepted belief and practice" , "Conventional state" , "Conventionality" .)