Word.ws English Dictionary

underspecific

underspecific adjective: not specific enough.

Adjective

underspecific (comparative more underspecific, superlative most underspecific)

  1. Not specific enough.
    • We show that exploiting diverse information sources can alleviate ambiguities that arise from contextual use of underspecific referring expressions and unexpressed argument alternations of verbs.2016, Shiwali Mohan, Aaron Mininger, John Laird, “Towards an Indexical Model of Situated Language Comprehension for Cognitive Agents in Physical Worlds”, in arXiv

Forms of underspecific

comparativemore underspecific
superlativemost underspecific

Origin of underspecific

From under- + specific.

Questions about underspecific

What does underspecific mean?
Underspecific means not specific enough.
What part of speech is underspecific?
Underspecific is an adjective.

Words near underspecific in the dictionary

  1. undersparred
  2. underspeak
  3. underspeaking
  4. underspeaks
  5. underspecies
  6. underspecific
  7. underspecification
  8. underspecifications
  9. underspecificity
  10. underspecified
  11. underspecifies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: underspecific (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-underspecific.wav.

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