underuse
Some medications are overused.
Sometimes we overuse and strain our muscles.
The phrase has been so over-used as to be almost meaningless.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Using and misusing
adopt
adoption
avail
avail yourself of something
be/go heavy on somethingidiom
exhaust
give/allow something full playidiom
go into something
go through
gobble something up
make capital out of somethingidiom
recycle
spare
swallow
tap
turn over
turn to someone/something
turn/use something to good accountidiom
unblock
underuse

Examples of overused

overused

In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use.

Cocoa farms were not adequately sprayed and farmers could not afford to apply fertilisers to overused land (interviews).
Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling.
These restrictive assumptions have been overused in the literature, since they are sometimes not realistic and sometimes not necessary.
The finding that go3 was overused by the participants is pertinent to theorizing about the use of a general classifier by very young children.
He found that learners at all proficiency levels overused direct requests and underused nonconventionallyindirect requests (hints).
The term ' emerging infection/disease ' is greatly overused today.
Although the term 'listening' seems to be overused in the literature on communication and counselling skills, it is undoubtedly the most important.
Were it not so overused, we would invoke the word "power" to designate what is at stake here.
Introspection can thus be overused to become a comfortable illusion for the theorist, and an obstacle for science.
Despite denials that they made any such claim, there is little doubt that in the first flush of enthusiasm some analytical tools were overused.
Midwives could not do internal examinations properly and overused harmful medicines.
Classifying something as being overused and stale does not immediately call to mind a distinctive linguistic category.
As one can expect, the central government will continue spending money on the ground subsidence problem as long as groundwater is overused in this area.
Thus, common nouns that were used as proper names formed a category of bare nouns that was clearly overused by children, particularly at younger ages.
This follows the common writing advice that words should not be overused.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.