undermine

CEFRB2

/ˌʌn.dəˈmaɪn/

verb

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

01
verb
To weaken someone's confidence, authority, or chance of success.
02
verb
Extra detail
To erode the base or foundation of something, e.g. by the action of water.

Examples

Many fear that cuts in the defense budget will undermine the military's effectiveness.
The market tends to undermine the very values that gave rise to it.

At a glance

Sits at B2 on the CEFR scale

Senses: 5
Parts of speech: 1
Citations: 5
Synonyms: 2

Deep Dive

verb

Extra meanings

To weaken or work against; to hinder, sabotage.
To dig underneath (something), to make a passage for destructive or military purposes; to sap.
To regard an object as the sum of the parts that compose it, in object-oriented ontology.

More examples

In context

Yanni didn't want to undermine Skura's Islamic faith.
The war efforts were undermined by the constant bickering between the allies.
The penile mishaps (one involving a bristled toothbrush), severings (one involves hungry ducks) and surgeries cited by Ms. Roach are nothing if not memorable, but her book consistently undermines its own discoveries.

Quick test

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Quick check

The lack of sleep and poor nutrition started to blank the athlete's performance over time.

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

Nearby

Citations

The word in print, with each source given in full.

Martin, for instance, had on one occasion undermined a tree sacred to old gods, then stood in the path of its fall, but forced it to fall elsewhere by making the sign of the Cross.
2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 312
The penile mishaps (one involving a bristled toothbrush), severings (one involves hungry ducks) and surgeries cited by Ms. Roach are nothing if not memorable, but her book consistently undermines its own discoveries.
2008 April 7, Janet Maslin, “A Sex Researcher Walks Into a Lab, and Then Things Start to Get Comical”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2022
Services between Glasgow Queen Street and Edinburgh Waverley via Falkirk High are currently suspended, following a 30-metre breach of the Union Canal that occurred on August 12 after torrential rain and thunderstorms. The thousands of gallons of water that cascaded onto the railway line below washed away track, ballast and overhead line equipment, and undermined embankments along a 300-metre section of Scotland's busiest rail link.
2020 August 26, “Network News: Major flood damage severs key Edinburgh-Glasgow rail artery”, in Rail, page 21
We can even go further: when we consider an object in everyday life we do not usually just undermine or overmine it as if it demanded an either/or approach, but rather we run the two processes in tandem: duomining, as Harman labels it.
2022, Nicholas Gayle, Conrad and the Being of the World, page 25
The growing use of social media to spread anger and dissent in the Arab world has been hailed by western governments as one of the chief justifications for a completely unfettered internet. The US is reportedly funding the secret rollout of technology in Iran in an effort to undermine internet censors in the country.
2012 April 19, Josh Halliday, “Free speech haven or lawless cesspool – can the internet be civilised?”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 08 May 2025

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Origin

verb

From under- + mine.

Deep Dive

verb

More examples

Related

Quick test

The lack of sleep and poor nutrition started to blank— the athlete's performance over time.

Nearby

Origin

verb

The lack of sleep and poor nutrition started to blank the athlete's performance over time.