Aggravate
adj, verb, slang ·Common ·Middle school level
Definitions
- 1 To make (an offence) worse or more severe; to increase in offensiveness or heinousness.
"Once more, the more to aggrauate the note, With a foule Traitors name ſtuffe I thy throte, And wiſh (ſo pleaſe my Soueraigne) ere I moue, What my tong ſpeaks, my right drawn ſword may proue"
- 2 make worse wordnet
- 3 To make (any bad thing) worse. broadly
"to aggravate my woes."
- 4 exasperate or irritate wordnet
- 5 To give extra weight or intensity to; to exaggerate, to magnify. archaic
"He aggravated the story."
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- 6 To pile or heap (something heavy or onerous) on or upon someone. obsolete
"In order to lighten the crown still further, they aggravated responsibility on ministers of state."
- 7 To exasperate; to provoke or irritate. colloquial, often, proscribed
"If both were to aggravate her parents, as my brother and sister do mine."
- 1 Aggravated. obsolete
- 2 Loaded, burdened, weighed down. obsolete
- 3 Heightened, intensified. obsolete
- 4 Under ecclesiastical censure, excommunicated. obsolete
Example
More examples"Magical are the straight lines in how they perturb the curved ones, aggravate their distortion and make them look more zigzagged, revealing their deceptive appearance."
Etymology
The adjective is first attested in 1471 in Middle English, the verb in 1530; from Latin aggravātus, perfect passive participle of aggravō (“to add to the weight of, make worse, oppress, annoy”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix) and -ate (adjective-forming suffix)), from ad- (“to”) + gravō (“to make heavy”), from gravis (“heavy”) + -ō (verb-forming suffix). See grave and compare aggrieve and aggrege. Participial usage of the adjective up until Early Modern English.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.