Word.ws English Dictionary

melioration

melioration is the archaic form of amelioration.

Meaning of amelioration

Noun

amelioration (countable and uncountable, plural ameliorations)

  1. The act of making better.
    • The tumult was over, and all things returned to their old place; and the abuse remained without remedy, and the wrong without redress. Ah! if the doctrine of amelioration be true, what a mighty debt does the future owe to the past!1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XXXII, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 262
    Antonyms:
    deterioration
  2. An improvement.
    Synonyms:
    revamp
  3. The process by which a term gains a more positive connotation over time.
    Antonyms:
    pejoration
  4. An ameliorative change of a concept or a repertoire of concepts.
    • pre-amelioration

Forms of melioration

pluralmeliorations

Origin of melioration

From Latin meliōrātiō.

Words formed from melioration

  • melioration theory

Questions about melioration

What is melioration the archaic form of?
Melioration is the archaic form of amelioration.

Words near melioration in the dictionary

  1. meliorated
  2. meliorater
  3. melioraters
  4. meliorates
  5. meliorating
  6. melioration
  7. meliorations
  8. meliorative
  9. meliorator
  10. meliorators
  11. meliorbiosis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: melioration (page history and authors); amelioration (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.

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Cite this entry: “melioration.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/melioration. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.