Word.ws English Dictionary

overrespond

overrespond verb: to respond excessively.

Verb

overrespond (third-person singular simple present overresponds, present participle overresponding, simple past and past participle overresponded)

  1. (intransitive) To respond excessively.
    • The impulse behind purple prose, he wrote, “is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened by something intolerably vivid.”2015 October 21, William Grimes, “Paul West, Writer Who Shoveled Absurdity Into His Books, Dies at 85”, in New York Times

Forms of overrespond

third-person singular presentoverresponds
present participleoverresponding
past participleoverresponded
pastoverresponded

Origin of overrespond

From over- + respond.

Questions about overrespond

What does overrespond mean?
Overrespond means to respond excessively.
What part of speech is overrespond?
Overrespond is a verb.
What is the past tense of overrespond?
The past tense of overrespond is overresponded.

Words near overrespond in the dictionary

  1. overrespect
  2. overrespected
  3. overrespectful
  4. overrespecting
  5. overrespects
  6. overrespond
  7. overresponded
  8. overresponder
  9. overresponders
  10. overresponding
  11. overresponds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overrespond (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: “overrespond.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/overrespond. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.