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belittle
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show 81 more with this conextual meaning
  • He hadn't meant to sound belittling, and yet Sophie Neveu was light-years out of her league.†   (source)
  • The Voice was our voice; he championed our causes; he made us proud of ourselves in an atmosphere that belittled and intimidated us.†   (source)
  • I never belittled Taylor and Wylie's three locks with three separate keys.†   (source)
  • Because I'm an assassin, and he's Captain of the Guard, forced to belittle himself by minding the would-be King's Champion.†   (source)
  • She had known all along, when she criticized the mink jacket, when she belittled his freckles and complained about his drinking habits.†   (source)
  • "You mustn't belittle yourself," Rhonda said.†   (source)
  • It has screamed at me, mocked me, belittled me, threatened me, cursed me.†   (source)
  • There really wasn't any way to talk about my experiences without seeming to belittle his, so I decided not to talk about Poland and the war.†   (source)
  • As a result, much of the expanse and variety of the human condition is belittled or invalidated.†   (source)
  • And all the time, he belittled me and attacked me for my love of the senses, my reluctance to kill, and the near swoon which killing could produce in me.†   (source)
  • But then I realize that he's not trying to dismiss or belittle my feelings.†   (source)
  • Not all supervisors in a slaughterhouse behave like Simon Legree, shouting at workers, cursing them, belittling their injuries, always pushing them to move faster.†   (source)
  • Even if I am wrong-and I mean not to belittle Eragon, who has proven himself a fine Rider-the dragon Saphira might have hatched for one of our race and not a human.†   (source)
  • Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor General, belittled the very idea of standing in the way of the King and called for the full-scale conquest of America.†   (source)
  • She used to sing in a church choir in her Big Ten town, she liked to call it, but quit over some belittlement, some perceived slight—how she would hate to hear me say perceived.†   (source)
  • It don't ask me to humble myself and belittle myself.†   (source)
  • Those listening had just learned the truth about her family; it would not be wise to belittle or condemn her.†   (source)
  • He seemed to take a perverse amusement in belittling his wife.†   (source)
  • He also showed that, for all the British fulminations about American usage, they could not resist adopting Americanisms: "Even to belittle, which had provoked an almost hysterical outburst from the European Magazine and London Review when Thomas Jefferson ventured to use it in 1787, was so generally accepted by 1862 that Anthony Trollope admitted it to his chaste vocabulary."†   (source)
  • Belittlers kept opinions to selves after that.†   (source)
  • But Naomi never ever uses her abilities or her education to belittle someone else, or make herself seem superior.†   (source)
  • "So, I can assume you found everything you came to see?" she said in a belittling tone.†   (source)
  • PRAISE-SINGER Far be it for me to belittle the dwellers of that place but, a man is either born to his art or he isn't.†   (source)
  • What my father so belittled and envied.†   (source)
  • Red had started noticing that any time it was a girls-only gathering, Pookie had a tendency to speak of Trey belittlingly.†   (source)
  • They belittled us, called us silly names.†   (source)
  • (The cassock is pulled off) Believe me, my friend, I do not belittle the honor His Majesty is doing me†   (source)
  • With a belittling laugh.†   (source)
  • Belittled.†   (source)
  • his head back through the ceiling and looked down at him with those empty blue eyes and said, "That's all right, Mr. Ralph, and suddenly Ralph realized that he had no intention of sleeping and would be there alone, not sleeping a wink, just ready in case he was needed; and that Tom had seen his malice, his desire to belittle him, and had belittled him instead, before his mother and his wife and his dying father.†   (source)
  • Leota's eleven o'clock customer pushed open the swing-door upon Leota paddling him heartily with the brush, while he gave angry but belittling screams which penetrated beyond the booth and filled the whole curious beauty parlor.†   (source)
  • He said, apologetically: "Dave, I wasn't meaning to belittle that science; I was only chaffing —chattering, I reckon I'd better say."   (source)
    belittle = to make something seem less important
  • Up to this juncture, it's been like being in a storm — so much instability, of dreams achieved and then shattered, of a silence within the walls of my body, of being turned on, beaten, belittled and pushed aside; forgotten and unimportant.†   (source)
  • As boring as a mortal, as trivial and unhappy as a mortal, he chattered over the game, belittling my experience, utterly locked against the possibility of any experience of his own.†   (source)
  • While one side belittled him as a creature of the Hamiltonians, the other scorned him as a friend of Elbridge Gerry.†   (source)
  • She was never belittling, nor did she pretend that I was special, and I can still remember her smoothing her somehow always tidy floorbed, the sheets invitingly turned down.†   (source)
  • The other men crowded around him, also laughing, as well as praising him with extravagant phrases, boasting that under his leadership they would capture Aroughs without so much as a single casualty, and belittling the courage and character of the city's inhabitants.†   (source)
  • In almost daily attacks in the Aurora, Adams was belittled as "The President by Three Votes," mocked again as "His Rotundity," excoriated as a base hypocrite, a tool of the British, "a man divested of his senses."†   (source)
  • Some pretended to ignore the horned warriors-although from the quickness of their motions and the shrill tones of their voices, Eragon could tell that the creatures unnerved them-while others glared at the Urgals and kept their hands on the pommels of their swords or daggers, and still others affected a false bravado and belittled the Urgals' notorious strength and boasted of their own.†   (source)
  • I had to jump in to keep her from belittling my younger brother, Stan, who had been mildly retarded since suffering a severe fever as a small child.†   (source)
  • Captain Ono's choice, of course, was intentionally belittling, though I could see, too, how the sign would serve to keep others away from the infirmary who would naturally assume there had been an outbreak.†   (source)
  • But after months of promises, I still could not get answers to my questions, and whenever I'd probe, I felt belittled and I'd back down.†   (source)
  • ROPER You belittle yourself, sir, this was not practical; (Resonantly) this was moral!†   (source)
  • Brom, who was the younger by three years, held Morzan in such high esteem, he allowed Morzan to belittle him, order him about, and otherwise treat him most shamefully.†   (source)
  • I was a young man, yes, but one of some learning and modest position as a junior officer, and if it was true that I was trained in a military school, not having his kind of university pedigree, it still seemed somewhat unfair of the doctor to belittle me so before a ward of enlisted men.†   (source)
  • sleep; and Tom pulled his head back through the ceiling and looked down at him with those empty blue eyes and said, "That's all right, Mr. Ralph, and suddenly Ralph realized that he had no intention of sleeping and would be there alone, not sleeping a wink, just ready in case he was needed; and that Tom had seen his malice, his desire to belittle him, and had belittled him instead, before his mother and his wife and his dying father.†   (source)
  • "I noticed that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling," he complained.†   (source)
  • LARRY—(with forced belittling casualness) He doesn't.†   (source)
  • I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.†   (source)
  • You seldom pass by the opportunity to slip in some belittling remark about her, so naturally it seems strange to me that you should elect to do the unselfish thing and stay here with her during this shelling.†   (source)
  • Belittled, betattled, spectacled and shackled, and pitifully snagged and by the tail wagged, with shilly and shally no more shall you dally.†   (source)
  • As for Wang Lung's sons, there was a continual unrest, the eldest son lest not enough be spent and they be belittled in the eyes of men and lest the villagers come walking through the great gate when a man from the town was there to call, and so make them ashamed before him; and the second son lest there was waste and money gone; and the youngest son striving to make repair the years he had lost as a farmer's son.†   (source)
  • Belittling?†   (source)
  • It may be I was belittling him by such a fear.†   (source)
  • This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how great and good her husband was.†   (source)
  • This morning he was darkly prepared to find something wrong, and he felt belittled when the mixture exploded sweet and strong, and the car didn't even brush the door-jamb, gouged and splintery with many bruisings by fenders, as he backed out of the garage.†   (source)
  • Of course this excited a curiosity so vast that it almost belittled the main matter—but the Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of his visitors, and through them be transmitted to the whole town, for he refused to part with his secret.†   (source)
  • The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation, and Miss Schlegel was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul.†   (source)
  • I'm not belittling our Western women.†   (source)
  • But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.†   (source)
  • There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and in some a certain loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your belittling criticisms and stilled them.†   (source)
  • It was all very well for Anne, who was sure of passing at least, to have her moments of belittling them, but when your whole future depended on them—as the girls truly thought theirs did—you could not regard them philosophically.†   (source)
  • When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves.†   (source)
  • To Mary as well as to the Divers the greeting was faintly comic; Mary gave an apologetic, belittling giggle; yet her voice, as she introduced her husband by his Asiatic title, flew proud and high.†   (source)
  • they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.†   (source)
  • Just so had she lied to Tommy last night, swearing to him that never before had she so entirely, so completely, so utterly......then remorse for this moment of betrayal, which so cavalierly belittled a decade of her life, turned her walk toward Dick's sanctuary.†   (source)
  • They hate me, and are jealous of me because they can't be like me, so they belittle me if they can.†   (source)
  • Mind you, I am not seeking to flout or belittle or reflect in any way on this poor, dead girl.†   (source)
  • To belittle all these years with something cheap and easy?†   (source)
  • To make Wellington so great is to belittle England.†   (source)
  • Shame on the passions which belittle man!†   (source)
  • The ease with which her reply reached him seemed to belittle his megaphone, so she raised her voice and called, "Can you hear me?"†   (source)
  • The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and irony: "Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can't offer you?"†   (source)
  • And yet his drunkenness did not belittle or demean him, caused him no disgrace, but rather, when joined with the majesty of his nature, it only made him grander and more awe-inspiring.†   (source)
  • "But you belittle ME, don't you," she returned gently, "in being so sure they are the only things I care for?"†   (source)
  • At the moment, however, their current discussion consumed his total attention, because Naphta now went on to discuss in caustic fashion the general biases that induced humanists to honor health on principle and dishonor and belittle sickness whenever possible—a position, however, that revealed a remarkable and almost praiseworthy self-abnegation on Herr Settembrini's part, since he was himself ill.†   (source)
  • For on the one hand all her conventional training was now urging her to stand firm—not to belittle herself in this way—whereas on the other, all her desires for love, understanding, companionship, urged her to run after him before it was too late, and he was gone.†   (source)
  • His work became confused with Nicole's problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work.†   (source)
  • She could take care of herself anywhere—" Lest this belittle Nicole's ability to do likewise, he added, "After all, she's an actress, and even though her mother's in the background she has to look out for herself."†   (source)
  • He gave the English their first taste of /to belittle/, one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson.†   (source)
  • Jefferson, always hospitable to new words, used /to belittle/ in his "Notes on Virginia," and Thornton thinks that he coined it.†   (source)
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