Understatement

How to spell understatement

14 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce understatement

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does understatement mean?

1. nounA description that deliberately presents something as smaller, milder, or less important than it really is.

Understatement in a sentence

• Calling the storm damage minor was a serious understatement.

• To say the meeting ran long would be an understatement, since it lasted four hours.

Where does understatement come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built from three English-friendly parts that all trace back to Latin. The core, 'state', comes through Old French from the Latin verb 'statuere', meaning 'to set up or establish', and the related noun 'status', meaning 'a condition or standing'; by the time it became an English verb it meant 'to set down in words, to express plainly'. The prefix 'under-' is a native Germanic element meaning 'below' or 'less than the full amount', and the suffix '-ment' (also from Latin, by way of French) turns a verb into the name of its result. Joined together, to 'understate' something is to express it as less than it really is, and the 'understatement' is the resulting deliberately modest description. The verb 'understate' appears in the 1700s and the noun followed soon after, becoming a favourite of dry, restrained English humour. The spelling is simply the three blocks stacked in order, so spelling it correctly is mostly a matter of trusting that under + state + ment fit together with no letters dropped.

How the word is built

• under- (below, less than)
• state (to express, from Latin status: condition)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)