Overrated

How to spell overrated

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce overrated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does overrated mean?

1. adjectiveJudged to be better, more important, or more valuable than it actually is.

Overrated in a sentence

• Many diners felt the famous restaurant was wildly overrated for the price.

• Critics now consider the once-celebrated film badly overrated.

Where does overrated come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound of the native English prefix 'over-' and the verb 'rate'. The prefix descends from Old English 'ofer', meaning 'above' or 'beyond', and it carries the everyday sense of doing something to excess. The verb 'rate' arrived in the 1400s and traces back to the Latin 'rata', shortened from 'pro rata parte' ('according to the reckoned share'), built on 'reri', meaning 'to reckon or calculate'. To 'rate' something therefore meant to assess its worth or assign it a value, and to 'overrate' it, recorded from the 1600s, meant to value it too highly. The adjective 'overrated' simply freezes that judgement into a fixed form. The spelling trap is the doubled 'r': 'over' ends in 'r' and 'rate' begins with 'r', so both must be written even though the voice glides over them as one sound.

How the word is built

• over- (too much, excessively)
• rate (to judge or value, from Latin rata 'reckoned')
• -ed (past-participle/adjective suffix)