Mitigate
adj, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 To reduce, lessen, or decrease and thereby to make less severe or easier to bear. transitive
"Measures are pursuing to prevent or mitigate the usual consequences of such outrages, and with the hope of their succeeding at least to avert general hostility."
- 2 to temper wordnet
- 3 To downplay. transitive
- 4 lessen or to try to lessen the seriousness or extent of wordnet
- 5 To give force or effect toward preventing a problem. intransitive, proscribed
"We've mitigated against the chance of flooding."
- 1 Mitigated, alleviated. obsolete
Example
More examples"Reducing deforestation is one way to mitigate the impacts of climate change."
Etymology
From Middle English mitigaten (“to relieve pain, soothe; (swelling) to abate; (hemorrhoids) to relieve; (the mind) to placate, appease; to end, check; to stop, cease”), from mitigat(e) (“mitigated, alleviated, relived”, also used as the past participle of mitigaten) + -en (verb-forming suffix), borrowed from Latin mītigātus, the perfect passive participle of mītigō (“to make soft, ripe; to tame, pacify”), from mītis (“gentle, mild, ripe”) + -igō (“to do, make”), of uncertain origin, but perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *meh₁y- (“mild, soft”).
From Middle English mitigat(e) (“mitigated”, also used as the past participle of mitigaten and of mitigate in Early Modern English), see -ate (adjective-forming suffix) and Etymology 1 for more.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.