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"If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Parents have given that good advice for years, but unfortunately many people haven't heeded it. The word pejorative makes it clear that both English and Latin speakers have long known that disparaging words can make a bad situation worse. Pejorative derives from the Late Latin adjective pējōrātus, which in turn comes from the Latin verb pējōrāre, meaning "to make or become worse." Although pejorative words have probably always been part of English, the adjective pejorative has only been found in English texts since the late 1880s. Before then, English speakers could rely on older synonyms of pejorative such as derogatory and uncomplimentary to describe disparaging words.
Synonyms
Examples of pejorative in a Sentence
Matt Ridley, Genome, 1999
The word barbarian was used by the Greeks, to designate an alien, and therefore, by definition, someone inferior in culture to a Hellene. The Romans applied this in the pejorative sense to the people who came to live along the Rhine-Danube frontier.
—Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 1993
On occasion they expressed a preference for the terms Latino or Hispanic if that would assist them in escaping from the term Puerto Rican, which became, at times, almost pejorative.
—John Hope Franklin, "The Land of Room Enough," 1981,
in Race and History, 1989
a word with pejorative connotations
the reviewer used the pejorative word “versifier” to refer to the writer, whose poems had struck a responsive chord with the general public
K. Thor Jensen, PCMAG, 14 Oct. 2024
Even if the r-word was banished, wouldn’t new pejoratives simply replace it?
—Constance Grady, Vox, 7 Dec. 2018
Michael Salerno, The Arizona Republic, 24 Oct. 2024
In domestic economic policy, trickle-down economics has become a pejorative term.
—Timothy Meyer, Foreign Affairs, 26 June 2018
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Cite this Entry
“Pejorative.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pejorative. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
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