Word.ws English Dictionary

underseek

underseek verb: to examine; explore; investigate.

Verb

underseek (third-person singular simple present underseeks, present participle underseeking, simple past and past participle undersought)

  1. (transitive, otherwise rare) To examine; explore; investigate.
    • Hans parted his lips. "Underseeking your customs was the Kratzer's great work, and I have the sentence in my head that this example will please him. Perhaps.2007, Michael Flynn, Eifelheim - Page 206
  2. (transitive) To spend too little time or effort in seeking.
    • Bindman et al. (1995) found that there is little propensity to underseek care for serious conditions indicating that need can be a substantial motive for the use ^([sic]) health care services.2007, Paul Richard Brezinski, Veteran Status, Health Status, and Use of Health Services - Page 24
    • While basic economic theory predicts that all collective or public goods will be "underdemanded" due to collective action problems, the extent to which public goods are undersought is a function of the size of the group benefiting from the public good and the distribution of benefits within that...2008, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Symposium: the domestic commander in chief - Page 1277

Forms of underseek

third-person singular presentunderseeks
present participleunderseeking
past participleundersought
pastundersought

Origin of underseek

From Middle English underseken, onderseken (also undersechen), from Old English undersēcan (“to investigate, examine”), equivalent to under- + seek. Cognate with West Frisian ûndersykje (“to research”), Dutch onderzoeken (“to investigate, probe, examine”), German untersuchen (“to examine, investigate, explore”).

Questions about underseek

What does underseek mean?
Underseek means to examine; explore; investigate.
What part of speech is underseek?
Underseek is a verb.
What is the past tense of underseek?
The past tense of underseek is undersought.

Words near underseek in the dictionary

  1. undersedated
  2. undersedation
  3. undersee
  4. underseeded
  5. underseeing
  6. underseek
  7. underseen
  8. undersees
  9. undersegmentation
  10. undersegmentations
  11. undersegmented

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: underseek (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-underseek.wav.

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