underwhelm

English

Etymology

From under- +‎ whelm: a humorous coinage by novel negation of overwhelm[1] first recorded in the 1950's.[2]

Pronunciation

  • Audio (US):(file)

Verb

underwhelm (third-person singular simple present underwhelms, present participle underwhelming, simple past and past participle underwhelmed)

  1. To fail to impress; to perform disappointingly.
    • 2021 August 5, Shira Ovide, “YouTube Is Underwhelming”, in The New York Times‎[1], →ISSN:
      The fact that I even mentioned YouTube in the same paragraph as the middling TV company ViacomCBS and Twitter … well, that says something about how YouTube has underwhelmed for some time.

Antonyms

Translations

See also

References

  1. ^ “underwhelm”, in Collins English Dictionary.
  2. ^ “underwhelm”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.