self-effacing

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Shy and modest
aw shucks
backward
bashful
bashfully
bashfulness
deprecating
inadequacy
inadequate
indoorsiness
indoorsy
inhibited
mousy
reticent
retiring
self-conscious
self-consciously
self-consciousness
self-deprecating
wallflower
withdrawn

Examples of effacing

effacing

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

Their feeling of security was a self-deception, they were effacing an aspect of reality, a phenomenon which, in clinical psychiatry, is labelled denial.
Instead, he began to consider models for effacing a dualism between mechanism and organism.
This pushed organised women into the arms of the state as well as effacing gender differences.
Limiting investigations in this way emphasizes elite, verbal ways of knowing the world while effacing less textually oriented forms of cultural production.
Assimilation implies that a minority increasingly takes on the characteristics of the majority, in the process diluting or effacing cultural characteristics that mark them out as different.
Grafting, in other words, involves the strange practice of both drawing attention to a sense of verbal and musical identity yet at the same time effacing it.
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.