overstate

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
OTT
protest too muchidiom
underplay
underrate

downplay | American Dictionary

downplay
verb[ T ]
us/ˈdɑʊnˌpleɪ/
to make something seem less important or not as bad as it really is:
The mayor is trying to downplay the crisis.

Examples of downplay

downplay
Traditionally researchers have tried to downplay external factors and have tried to argue that internal factors alone are responsible for the facts.
She downplays the administrative practice, in recognizing chiefs, of supporting one ruling-family faction against another on political grounds.
Such a cultural orientation would downplay traditional notions of self-determination and the work ethic.
In fact, both governments and the newspapers they influenced had an interest in downplaying official involvement in the press.
Labor officials and others consistently downplayed the wider political significance of the employer-mandate idea.
These authors suggest that a goal of ethics commentators is to emphasize the facts, especially those that have been omitted or downplayed.
Rather than either emphasising or downplaying the role of formal worker organisations, the authors describe a mixed history.
While not denying that they had confined their wives, they downplayed its significance.
This tends to downplay the impact of crops where a country has a comparative advantage in production.
These comments serve to generally downplay the importance of popular music in terms of identity.
The focus on synthesizing also downplays the depth of disagreements about the importance of ethnicity during and after the war.
Similarly, he downplays the romantic aspect of the play.
It is not necessary to downplay one in order to make an argument for the other.
Conversely, those downplaying the ongoing role of the party were not necessarily less radical or totalitarian.
Note that this response need not downplay the importance of fear, anxiety, and insecurity in people's lives.
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.