Exaggerate

How to spell exaggerate

10 letters · 4 syllables

27 of the 67 people asked to spell exaggerate in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is exagerate. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

exagerate exaggerate

What people typed instead

• exagerate12 people

How to pronounce exaggerate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exaggerate mean?

1. verbTo represent something as larger, better, or worse than it really is; to overstate.

Exaggerate in a sentence

• Try not to exaggerate the story.

• He tends to exaggerate when telling stories.

• Don't exaggerate the difficulty of the task.

Where does exaggerate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin exaggerare, which literally meant 'to heap up' or 'to pile high'. It was built from the prefix ex-, here acting as an intensifier meaning 'thoroughly', and the noun agger, meaning a 'heap', 'mound', or 'embankment' of earth. A Roman who exaggerated something was, in the original sense, piling it ever higher, and from that physical image of mounding up came the figurative idea of magnifying or overstating. English adopted the word in the sixteenth century, first in the literal sense of heaping or accumulating, before the modern meaning of overstating took hold. The buried double g, which traces straight back to agger, is the very spot where modern writers stumble, since the sound gives no hint that two g letters are needed.

How the word is built

• ex- (thoroughly)
• agger (heap, pile)
• -ate (verb)

People who misspell exaggerate also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got exaggerate wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• supersede 100% of them got it wrong