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SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Exaggerating & playing down
bloviate
blow something out of proportionidiom
cartoonish
cartoonishly
catastrophize
fulsome
go overboardidiom
grandiloquent
inflated
make a mountain out of a molehillidiom
make little of somethingidiom
make much of somethingidiom
make something of something/someone
meal
mildly
minimization
overrated
protest too muchidiom
underplay
underrate

Examples of understating

understating

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

Most start by understating the problem of remuneration, some going as far as volunteering for unpaid work.
Such an approach runs the risk of understating those aspects of relationships which change only slowly.
The model's spectrum largely overstates the contribution of low and medium frequencies, while largely understating the contribution of the high frequencies.
Since the relationship is slightly concave, the errors introduced by understating persistence are smaller than those introduced by overstating persistence.
The biases that heuristics induce are not constant errors - the type of error that a friendly scale makes in understating all weights.
Understating real wage growth would tend to overstate replacement rates but understate final retirement wealth.
The latter already points, however, to a better understating of why geriatricians do much of what they do.
Interestingly, these variations virtually prevent us from overstating the policy effects in the north and understating them in the south.
Unfortunately, data are not available to check the consistency of this understating among older women.
This leads to an understating of the importance of the trade for the economy as a whole.
Maghen may be understating the role of bodily fluids and gases in causing the preclusion.
That also took place during the month and, therefore, the figure of £12 million is understating the real improvement.
From the
Hansard archive