Word.ws English Dictionary

undershoot

undershoot verb: to shoot not far enough or not well enough.

Verb

undershoot (third-person singular simple present undershoots, present participle undershooting, simple past and past participle undershot)

  1. To shoot not far enough or not well enough.
  2. To fail to go far enough when trying to reach a goal.
  3. (broadly) To underestimate.
    • The first day, I think I undershot how much I should've been drinking, because it had almost no effect on me.2014, Dave Schilling, One of Our Writers Went on an All-Alcohol Diet for a Week
    • Just weeks ago, however, America’s top epidemiologists badly undershot how quickly COVID-19 would spread.2020, Brendan Kirby, Experts made coronavirus forecasts in mid-March; they whiffed badly
  4. To record too little photographic footage.

Noun

undershoot (countable and uncountable, plural undershoots)

  1. The situation where a neuron's membrane potential falls below the normal resting potential.
  2. An instance of undershooting.
    • In this model, a fiscal or saving shock in one country leads to an overshoot of the real exchange rate between the two countries and of the real interest rate in the other country, and an undershoot of the real interest rate in the first country.1994, Peter B. Kenen, Francesco Papadia, Fabrizio Saccomanni, The International Monetary System, →ISBN, page 109

Antonyms of undershoot

Forms of undershoot

Verb
third-person singular presentundershoots
present participleundershooting
past participleundershot
pastundershot
Noun
pluralundershoots

Past tense of undershoot: undershot

Origin of undershoot

From under- + shoot.

Words formed from undershoot

Questions about undershoot

What does undershoot mean?
Undershoot means to shoot not far enough or not well enough.
What part of speech is undershoot?
Undershoot can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of undershoot?
The past tense of undershoot is undershot.

Words near undershoot in the dictionary

  1. undershirt
  2. undershirted
  3. undershirts
  4. undershoe
  5. undershoes
  6. undershoot
  7. undershooter
  8. undershooters
  9. undershooting
  10. undershoots
  11. undershorts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undershoot (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-undershoot.wav.

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