Word.ws English Dictionary

minimizing

minimizing is the present participle and gerund of minimize.

Meaning of minimize

Verb

minimize (third-person singular simple present minimizes, present participle minimizing, simple past and past participle minimized)

  1. (transitive) To make (something) smaller or as small as possible; shrink; reduce.
    • We have to minimize the budget.
    Antonyms:
    maximize
  2. (transitive) To relegate or assign (something) to a less insignificant status; diminish.
    • The insurance adjuster tried to minimize the extent of the damage to lessen the company's exposure to liability.
  3. (transitive) To remove (a window) from the main display area, collapsing it to an icon or caption.
    • I didn't close anything, but I minimized all the windows so I could see the desktop.
    Antonyms:
    maximize
  4. (transitive) To treat (someone) in a slighting manner.
    • […] father who had never openly minimized him or anything he did […]1993, Jan McDaniel, One Golden Summer, page 95
  5. (transitive) To treat as trivial or insignificant; to trivialize.
    • to minimize someone's feelings

Adjective

minimizing (comparative more minimizing, superlative most minimizing)

  1. Tending to minimize.
    • “It can be incredibly stressful to field questions from people who have the best of intentions but don’t know how their questions are landing or how they can feel minimizing or insensitive,” Dr. Kaeni said.2022 January 22, Alyson Krueger, “Oh, By the Way: I Had a Baby”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 24 Mar 2022

Forms of minimizing

comparativemore minimizing
superlativemost minimizing

Questions about minimizing

What does minimizing mean?
Minimizing means tending to minimize.
What is minimizing the present participle and gerund of?
Minimizing is the present participle and gerund of minimize.
What part of speech is minimizing?
Minimizing is an adjective.

Words near minimizing in the dictionary

  1. minimize
  2. minimized
  3. minimizer
  4. minimizers
  5. minimizes
  6. minimizing
  7. minimod
  8. minimodded
  9. minimodding
  10. minimods
  11. minimodule

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: minimizing (page history and authors); minimize (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: “minimizing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/minimizing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.