look down upon
look down upon is the alternative form of look down on.
Meaning of look down on
Verb
look down on (third-person singular simple present looks down on, present participle looking down on, simple past and past participle looked down on)
- To regard or treat as inferior.
- He remembers feeling that people looked down on him, and, ‘realising I was rubbish at academic stuff’, he decided he'd join a circus.2009 September 25, Michael Deacon, “Ross Noble: interview”, in Telegraph.co.uk
- Synonyms:
- disesteem, disdain, look down one's nose, contemn, despect, disrespect, despise, misrespect, scorn, spurn
- Antonyms:
- look up to, respect, esteem, honor, idolize, lay store by, prize, hallow, put store by, put store in
- To view from a vantage point.
- High up on the viaduct, and approached by a spidery staircase from the street, it looks down on Southwark Cathedral.1948 March and April, “A Keypoint in an Intensive Service”, in Railway Magazine, page 115
- To view [people or events on Earth] from the vantage point of the afterlife (originally, Heaven).
- I get a feeling Kurt Cobain is looking down on Nickelback and wondering what alternative rock has become.
Forms of look down upon
| third-person singular present | looks down upon |
|---|---|
| present participle | looking down upon |
| past participle | looked down upon |
| past | looked down upon |
Questions about look down upon
- What is look down upon the alternative form of?
- Look down upon is the alternative form of look down on.
Words near look down upon in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: look down upon (page history and authors); look down on (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-look down upon.ogg.
Cite this entry: “look down upon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/look_down_upon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
