Exaggerating

How to spell exaggerating

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce exaggerating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exaggerating mean?

1. verbDescribing or representing something as larger, better, or worse than it really is.

Exaggerating in a sentence

• He was clearly exaggerating the size of the fish he had caught.

• Without exaggerating the figures, the quarterly report still showed strong growth.

Where does exaggerating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin verb exaggerare, which literally meant 'to heap up' or 'to pile high'. It was built from the prefix ex-, used here as an intensifier meaning 'thoroughly', and aggerare, 'to heap up', which in turn came from agger, a 'heap' or 'mound' of earth. The original sense was very physical, the building up of a literal pile, but Romans soon used it figuratively for piling on words and overstating a case. English took the word in during the sixteenth century, by which point the meaning had settled on magnifying something beyond the truth. The doubled g, the part that trips so many adult writers, is a direct fossil of that agger 'heap' root, so picturing a 'heap' with its hard double g can help fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• ex- (thoroughly, intensive)
• agger (heap, mound)
• -ate (verb)
• -ing (present participle)