Word of the Day:
vilipend
What It Means
To treat (something) as inconsequential or worthless; to despise, to look down on.
To express a disparaging opinion of; to slander or vilify.
Vilipend in Context
“But, for all their feint of nonchalance, these young persons have no other task in life but to explain and extol their own conduct and to vilipend their critics and opponents.”
Did You Know?
From Middle English vilipenden (“to treat (something) as contemptible”) [and other forms], from Old French vilipender (modern French vilipender (“to condemn, despise, revile, scorn, vilipend, vilify”)), or its etymon Latin vilipendō, from vīlis (“cheap, inexpensive; base, mean, vile, worthless”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wes- (“to buy, sell”)) + pendō (“to hang, suspend; to weigh, weigh out; (figuratively) to consider, ponder”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pend- (“to stretch”)). The English word is cognate with Italian vilipendere (“to despise, scorn, vilipend”), Portuguese vilipendiar (“to vilify”), Spanish vilipendiar (“to vilify”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: vilipend (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “vilipend.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/vilipend. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.