Word.ws English Dictionary

underarrest

underarrest verb: to arrest at a disproportionately low rate.

Verb

underarrest (third-person singular simple present underarrests, present participle underarresting, simple past and past participle underarrested)

  1. (transitive) To arrest at a disproportionately low rate.
    • Sorry, I’m Italian, and let’s say I see that Sicilian policemen arrest less people in Sicily. This could be for two reasons, one is that everybody else overarrests, or the Sicilian policemen underarrest. And can you tell those two things apart?2020 June 12, Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales, “Should we defund the police?”, in Capitalisn't, archived from the original on 20 Feb 2026

Antonyms of underarrest

Forms of underarrest

third-person singular presentunderarrests
present participleunderarresting
past participleunderarrested
pastunderarrested

Origin of underarrest

From under- + arrest.

Questions about underarrest

What does underarrest mean?
Underarrest means to arrest at a disproportionately low rate.
What part of speech is underarrest?
Underarrest is a verb.
What is the past tense of underarrest?
The past tense of underarrest is underarrested.

Words near underarrest in the dictionary

  1. underarm crutches
  2. underarmed
  3. underarming
  4. underarms
  5. underarousal
  6. underarrest
  7. underarticulate
  8. underarticulated
  9. underarticulates
  10. underarticulating
  11. underarticulation

Source and license

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