Word.ws English Dictionary

overjustify

overjustify verb: to justify excessively; to provide too much justification for.

Verb

overjustify (third-person singular simple present overjustifies, present participle overjustifying, simple past and past participle overjustified)

  1. (transitive) To justify excessively; to provide too much justification for.
  2. (transitive) Specifically, to provide external incentive for an already-internally-motivated behavior, thereby risking the loss of the original motivation.

Forms of overjustify

third-person singular presentoverjustifies
present participleoverjustifying
past participleoverjustified
pastoverjustified

Origin of overjustify

From over- + justify.

Words formed from overjustify

Questions about overjustify

What does overjustify mean?
Overjustify means to justify excessively; to provide too much justification for.
What part of speech is overjustify?
Overjustify is a verb.
What is the past tense of overjustify?
The past tense of overjustify is overjustified.

Words near overjustify in the dictionary

  1. overjust
  2. overjustification
  3. overjustifications
  4. overjustified
  5. overjustifies
  6. overjustify
  7. overjustifying
  8. overjut
  9. overjuts
  10. overjutted
  11. overjutting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overjustify (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:

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