Discouraging

//dɪsˈkɝ.ɪ.d͡ʒɪŋ// adj, noun, verb

adj, noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    discouragement

    "August 6, 1841, Lydia Ann Barclay, letter to J. B. But, alas! I fear the health of the better part is dwindling instead of increasing, through letting in the enemy's discouragings, and a want of feeling after the daily sap of life, whereby strength would be received to overcome all obstacles […]"

Verb
  1. 1
    present participle and gerund of discourage form-of, gerund, participle, present
Adjective
  1. 1
    That causes discouragement.

    "Near-synonyms: disheartening; see also Thesaurus:disheartening"

Adjective
  1. 1
    depriving of confidence or hope or enthusiasm and hence often deterring action wordnet
  2. 2
    expressing disapproval in order to dissuade wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
dishearteningdissuasiveintimidatingadmonitoryalarmingawing

Example

More examples

"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.