Word.ws English Dictionary

undereducate

undereducate verb: to provide an inadequate education.

Verb

undereducate (third-person singular simple present undereducates, present participle undereducating, simple past and past participle undereducated)

  1. (transitive) To provide an inadequate education.
    • Throughout this decade, education must be increasingly upgraded and relevant. To fail to identify important human and societal needs is to undereducate students.1984, Hershel D. Thornburg, Introduction to Educational Psychology, page 509
    • A basic problem with the educable mentally retarded person is that we still do not know what his ultimate learning potential is and, as a result, we often undereducate this person.1986, Les Sternberg, Ronald L. Taylor, Jeffrey Schilit, So You're Not a Special Educator

Forms of undereducate

third-person singular presentundereducates
present participleundereducating
past participleundereducated
pastundereducated

Origin of undereducate

From under- + educate.

Questions about undereducate

What does undereducate mean?
Undereducate means to provide an inadequate education.
What part of speech is undereducate?
Undereducate is a verb.
What is the past tense of undereducate?
The past tense of undereducate is undereducated.

Words near undereducate in the dictionary

  1. undereats
  2. undereddened
  3. underedge
  4. underedges
  5. underedited
  6. undereducate
  7. undereducated
  8. undereducates
  9. undereducating
  10. undereducation
  11. undereffective

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undereducate (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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