Glass-half-empty

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    pessimistic idiomatic, not-comparable

    "Susan Kropf, the company's president and chief operating officer, says that while the management team is “by nature optimistic,” there is a “glass half empty kind of mentality.” Says Kropf. “We always think about what more we could have done, or how we could have done it better.”"

Example

More examples

"Susan Kropf, the company's president and chief operating officer, says that while the management team is “by nature optimistic,” there is a “glass half empty kind of mentality.” Says Kropf. “We always think about what more we could have done, or how we could have done it better.”"

Etymology

From the expression "Is the glass half empty or half full?", the answer to which is said to determine whether a person is optimistic or pessimistic.

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