Word.ws English Dictionary

self-defeating

self-defeating adjective: containing elements that will cause it to fail; destined not to succeed by its very nature.

Adjective

self-defeating (comparative more self-defeating, superlative most self-defeating)

  1. (action) Containing elements that will cause it to fail; destined not to succeed by its very nature.
    • Cutting off your nose to spite your face is self-defeating.
    • [...] to make commuter operations profitable, a 70 per cent fare rise would be necessary. The president admitted that an increase of this magnitude would be self-defeating and suggested that the commuter himself should not have to bear the whole burden because the service was not exclusively for...1960 April, “Talking of Trains: The U.S. commuter problem”, in Trains Illustrated, page 201

Examples of self-defeating in a sentence

  • The important thing to remember is that jumping the gun is usually self-defeating.1972, Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 24:
  • Many people therefore see the industrial action as self-defeating.2022 March 23, Paul Clifton, “Londoners pay the price”, in RAIL, number 953, page 49:

Synonyms of self-defeating

Forms of self-defeating

comparativemore self-defeating
superlativemost self-defeating

Origin of self-defeating

From self- + defeating (present participle of defeat).

Words formed from self-defeating

Phrases with self-defeating

Questions about self-defeating

What does self-defeating mean?
Self-defeating means containing elements that will cause it to fail; destined not to succeed by its very nature.
How do you use self-defeating in a sentence?
The important thing to remember is that jumping the gun is usually self-defeating.
What part of speech is self-defeating?
Self-defeating is an adjective.

Words near self-defeating in the dictionary

  1. self-deceptive
  2. self-declare
  3. self-declared
  4. self-declares
  5. self-declaring
  6. self-defeating
  7. self-defeating personality disorder
  8. self-defeating personality disorders
  9. self-defeating prophecies
  10. self-defeating prophecy
  11. self-defence

Source and license

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