Word.ws English Dictionary

undersay

/ʌndə(ɹ)ˈseɪ/

undersay verb: to say by way of derogation or contradiction.

Verb

undersay (third-person singular simple present undersays, present participle undersaying, simple past and past participle undersaid)

  1. (obsolete) To say by way of derogation or contradiction.
    • They say, they con to heaven the highway; But by my soul I dare undersay, They never set foot on that same troad, But balke their right way, and strayen abroad.1579, Immeritô [pseudonym; Edmund Spenser], “September. Ægloga Nona.”, in The Shepheardes Calender: […], London: […] Iohn Wolfe for Iohn Harrison the yonger, […], →OCLC
  2. To understate.
    • My words undersay it, of course; I mean something rarer than critical, something better than ethical, and perhaps I had better retreat upon such a word as spiritual.1899, W.D. Howells, “The New Poetry”, in The North American Review, volume 168, page 586
    • How to undersay things when so many oversay them is one thing learnt.1913, Laurence Jerrold, The French and the English, page 60

Forms of undersay

third-person singular presentundersays
present participleundersaying
past participleundersaid
pastundersaid

Origin of undersay

From under- + say.

Questions about undersay

What does undersay mean?
Undersay means to say by way of derogation or contradiction.
What part of speech is undersay?
Undersay is a verb.
How do you pronounce undersay?
Undersay is pronounced /ʌndə(ɹ)ˈseɪ/.
What is the past tense of undersay?
The past tense of undersay is undersaid.

Words near undersay in the dictionary

  1. undersaves
  2. undersaving
  3. undersaw
  4. undersawyer
  5. undersawyers
  6. undersay
  7. undersaying
  8. undersays
  9. underscan
  10. underscarf
  11. underscarfs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undersay (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-undersay.wav.

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