Word.ws English Dictionary

underbreed

underbreed verb: to breed insufficiently.

Verb

underbreed (third-person singular simple present underbreeds, present participle underbreeding, simple past and past participle underbred)

  1. To breed insufficiently.
    • Whether this political torrent is to be for good or bad for the country at large, whether it is going to breed statesmen or underbreed statesmanship, are points on which a physician need offer no opinion.1884, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, The Asclepiad
    • It is just as hopeless to overbreed the under-cultured, as it is to underbreed the cultural.1948, Harold Lark Harris, Decentralization, page 24

Noun

underbreed (plural underbreeds)

  1. An inferior or subservient breed of people or sentient beings.
    • Leaf felt degraded by that — hiring on, in effect, as an indentured underbreed — but what choice was there for him?1973, Terry Carr, Richard A. Lupoff, Robert Silverberg, No Mind of Man: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction, page 122
    • I had an idea who it was but called the command post and demanded the names of the underbreeds who had last piloted the jet1995, Alan Cockrell, Tail of the Storm: Flying Missions in the First Gulf War, →ISBN, page 49

Forms of underbreed

Verb
third-person singular presentunderbreeds
present participleunderbreeding
past participleunderbred
pastunderbred
Noun
pluralunderbreeds

Origin of underbreed

From under- + breed.

Questions about underbreed

What does underbreed mean?
Underbreed means to breed insufficiently.
What part of speech is underbreed?
Underbreed can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of underbreed?
The past tense of underbreed is underbred.

Words near underbreed in the dictionary

  1. underbreathing
  2. underbreaths
  3. underbred
  4. underbredness
  5. underbreeches
  6. underbreed
  7. underbreeding
  8. underbreeds
  9. underbrew
  10. underbrewed
  11. underbrewer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: underbreed (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-underbreed.wav.

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