self-defeating

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

to beat someone in a race, competition, etc.
beatUnited beat City 3 - 2.
defeatCan Ireland defeat New Zealand in this high-stakes match?
conquerThe Greeks had fought and conquered the army of Mardonius.
vanquishThe superhero always vanquishes his foes and saves the world.
annihilateModern superpowers succeed not by annihilating their enemies but by buying them off.
hammerThe Colts got hammered by the Patriots.
B2
to cause someone or something to fail: 使失败，使落空
The proposal to change the rules was narrowly defeated (= by a very small number) by 201 votes to 196.变更规则的提案以196票对201票的微弱劣势未获通过。
Our ambitions for this tournament have been defeated by the weather.天气使我们赢得锦标赛的雄心壮志落空了。
I'm afraid anything that involves language learning has always defeated me (= I have been unable to do it).恐怕凡是与语言学习沾边的事都会把我难倒。
The French were defeated at Waterloo in 1815.1815年法军在滑铁卢被击败。
The team were overwhelmingly defeated in yesterday's game.在昨天的比赛中这支球队遭遇了惨败。
The North defeated the South in the American Civil War.美国内战中北方各州战胜了南方各州。
The bill was defeated in the Commons by 249 votes to 131.议案在下议院以249票对131票未获通过。
The four-times champion was unexpectedly defeated in the second round of the competition.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Winning and defeating
annihilate
annihilation
bank
be gunning for someoneidiom
be one in the eye for someoneidiom
convincing
mincemeat
moral victory
move/go/close in for the killidiom
near thing
outclass
scrape
sew
slaughter
sweep the boardidiom
take someone down
take someone to the cleaner'sidiom
take something apart
takedown
thrash

Examples of defeating

defeating

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

Revelations and confessions produce resolution and stability by defeating ignorance and equalising the knowledge of the audience and the characters.
Candidates running against the establishment were defeating candidates who had until recently appeared unbeatable.
The availability of credit from friendly central banks is of the first importance in defeating speculators.
Of course, other factors may also affect this calculus, including the possibility of modifying rather than defeating the reform.
The most effective way of ' defeating ' fear would be ' confronting ' it until one felt in control.
She is therefore likely to write them down, comprising security and defeating the efforts of the overall approach.
In equilibrium, the incumbent can always meet the incumbency criterion, defeating the challenger.
By contrast, precedents exclude, absolutely, reasons based on factors present in the precedent case from defeating the first-order reason.
This allows us to say that the lesser evil doesn't actually produce the greater good, but rather only sustains it, by defeating defeaters to it.
But this requires modifying the stack module, defeating the idea of an abstract data type.
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.