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
overrated
protest too muchidiom
underplay
underrate

Examples of downplaying

downplaying

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

In fact, both governments and the newspapers they influenced had an interest in downplaying official involvement in the press.
Rather than either emphasising or downplaying the role of formal worker organisations, the authors describe a mixed history.
Commentators have also questioned our downplaying of "other modeling" in ordinary conversation and our claims about the nature of the difference between monologue and dialogue.
Conversely, those downplaying the ongoing role of the party were not necessarily less radical or totalitarian.
These changes have the same effect - downplaying satire and emphasising the romantic quest - and perhaps even the same cause.
Eliade's approach, then, naturally focuses on these ' modalities ', downplaying historical considerations in favour of phenomenological analysis.
Descriptions of resolution often focus on the resolution rule alone, downplaying the role of factoring in proof construction.
Focusing on big events, and downplaying our ability to predict means-ends relationships, ought to move our political beliefs closer together.
The recent legislation promoting collaboration and downplaying competition seems to move in this direction.
Why there should be this downplaying of the nationalist thrust is hard to say.
I would interpret this as a general downplaying of the competitive elements and an increasing orientation towards cultural solidarity.
In fact, in recent years, conventional evolutionary theory has if anything, been further downplaying the role of phenotypes, sometimes reducing phenotypes to mere "vehicles" for their genes.
But in downplaying the significance of the expedition in this manner both authors are in the difficult position of downplaying the sheer extent of nineteenth-century developments, regardless of their causes.
Campbell follows the conventional wisdom in downplaying the problem represented by irregularity.
Similarly, practically all women who came of age in the inter-war years, whether writing in 1969 or 1980, tell stories about leisure, fun and entertainment, downplaying their workplace experiences.
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.