be·lit·tle

(bĭ-lĭt′l)

tr.v. be·lit·tled, be·lit·tling, be·lit·tles

1. To represent or speak of as unimportant or contemptible: a person who belittled our efforts to do the job right. See Synonyms at disparage.

2. To cause to seem little or smaller than something else: "Away on the very edge of the cliffs, close under the sky, were pines, belittled by distance" (Stewart Edward White).

be·lit′tle·ment n.

be·lit′tler n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

belittlement

noun

The act or an instance of belittling:

denigration, deprecation, depreciation, derogation, detraction, disparagement, minimization.

Translations

kleinering

belittlement

n → Herabsetzung f; (of achievement also) → Schmälerung f

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

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References in periodicals archive

Historically, our education planning has misfired under devolution - too many targets (nearly all missed), too many plans, visions, revisions and a catalogue of false dawns in the light of international belittlement.

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What follows is the belittlement of "over-paid, over-pampered prima donnas" for daring to think they were worldclass (when they never claimed to be in the first place), phonein rage, effigies, petitions, inquests and calls to s, calls for the manager's head.

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He added that some of the people whose houses were evacuated in the first phase of the buffer zone moved to houses in the second phase area asserting that the lack of transparency is a "belittlement" to the residents.

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Their acquired statuses thus place them outside the context of cognitive accountability, even if their minor sins touch, or even embrace the belittlement of the Arab reader's intelligence or the promotion of erroneous principles.

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Viewers, who'd obviously never attended school, thought this was a belittlement of Nazi Holocaust victims and his bosses, equally dumb, got rid.

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Lariviere responded to the concerns of the UO Senate and community with belittlement and refusal to even answer questions; this has established the tone of his presidency as unilateral, developer-friendly, and completely unaccountable to university faculty, staff and students.

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The stakes in the 2010 election for these voters went far beyond economic questions, and for Democratic leaders to reduce everything to frustrations about "the economy, stupid" represents a final act of belittlement.

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