underburden

underburden verb: to give too light a burden; to assign less than a fair share.

Verb

underburden (third-person singular simple present underburdens, present participle underburdening, simple past and past participle underburdened)

To give too light a burden; to assign less than a fair share.
- In reality, the levels of work varied: some internationals seemed overburdened with tasks and responsibility, some seemed underburdened, and some faced apparently just the right amount of work.2007, Kimberley Coles, Democratic Designs, →ISBN
- Well aware of the orgy of scapegoating that the world had embarked upon, I didn't want to blame anyone, let alone run the risk of overburdening some and underburdening others with responsibility for the crunch.2009, Tetsuya Ishikawa, How I Caused the Credit Crunch, →ISBN
To assign less work than someone or something is capable of.
- If a man is overburdened, which is the true cause of complaint, or underburdened, which is the modern cause of complaint, he may seek redress; but he alone who is overburdened or underburdened is authorised to seek redress.1826, David Dalrymple, Mungo Ponton Brown, Decisions of the Lords of Council and Session: From 1766 to 1791
- After five days of unsatisfactory work, we came to the conclusion that the furnace was underburdened.1909, American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, Society of Mining Engineers of AIME., American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, Transactions - Volume 39...

underburden (countable and uncountable, plural underburdens)

The rock and subsoil that lies below a mineral deposit such as a coal seam.
- Much of the heat introduced with the steam is lost to the overburden and to the underburden by thermal conduction in the manner discussed earlier.1991, Roger M. Butler, Thermal recovery of oil and bitumen, page 122
- Settari (2002) and Osorio et al. (1999) also suggest that the analysis domain should include overburdens, sideburdens and underburdens for better accommodation of the coupling effects of stress changes and flow.2007, Erik Eberhardt, Doug Stead, Tom Morrison, Rock Mechanics: Meeting Society's Challenges and Demands, →ISBN

You can tell when a furnace is underburdened by the continued tendency to make hotter iron than that desired, also by the continued use of cold air necessitating low stove heat.1916, Blast Furnace and Steel Plant - Volume 4, page 350:
Workers who are underburdened may experience stress because they feel their contributions to the company are not significant or that their talents are not being used.1990, Philip C. Grant, The Effort-net Return Model of Employee Motivation:
Measuring instruments which are connected to underburdened current transformers are adequately protected during normal operation, although this may not be the case in the event of a short-circuit.1994, Petra Belzner, Siemens, & Jan Dommisse, Switching, protection and distribution in low-voltage networks, →ISBN:
For the material parameters, caprock and underburden are considered as identical, and behave like clay.2014, Fusao Oka, Akira Murakami, Ryosuke Uzuoka, Computer Methods and Recent Advances in Geomechanics, →ISBN:

Verb
third-person singular present	underburdens
present participle	underburdening
past participle	underburdened
past	underburdened
Noun
plural	underburdens

From under- + burden.

What does underburden mean?: Underburden means to give too light a burden; to assign less than a fair share.
How do you use underburden in a sentence?: You can tell when a furnace is underburdened by the continued tendency to make hotter iron than that desired, also by the continued use of cold air necessitating low stove heat.
What part of speech is underburden?: Underburden can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of underburden?: The past tense of underburden is underburdened.

Adapted from Wiktionary: underburden (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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

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