Word.ws English Dictionary

overpunished

overpunished is the simple past and past participle of overpunish.

Meaning of overpunish

Verb

overpunish (third-person singular simple present overpunishes, present participle overpunishing, simple past and past participle overpunished)

  1. (transitive) To punish excessively; to issue a punishment that is harsher than necessary.
    • After each one of the two cards has been presented, the overpunished child will invariably say that the father (or mother) is going to hit the child with a belt, or fist, or some other implement; the child will feel bad; the child will be mad at the parent; and the child will want to run away, or...1976 March 1, Ralph S. Welsh, “VIOLENCE, PERMISSIVENESS THE OVERPUNISHED CHILD”, in Journal of Pediatric Psychology, volume 1, number 2, →DOI, page 68

Questions about overpunished

What is overpunished the simple past and past participle of?
Overpunished is the simple past and past participle of overpunish.

Words near overpunished in the dictionary

  1. overpunctuates
  2. overpunctuating
  3. overpunctuation
  4. overpungent
  5. overpunish
  6. overpunished
  7. overpunishes
  8. overpunishing
  9. overpunishment
  10. overpunishments
  11. overpurchase

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overpunished (page history and authors); overpunish (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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