Underdeveloped

adj, verb

adj, verb ·5 syllables ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    simple past and past participle of underdevelop form-of, participle, past
Adjective
  1. 1
    immature and not fully developed
  2. 2
    having a low level of economic productivity and technological sophistication
  3. 3
    of a film that has had insufficient development before being fixed
Adjective
  1. 1
    relating to societies in which capital needed to industrialize is in short supply wordnet
  2. 2
    not yet fully developed wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
immaturearrestedbackwardbehindhandcallowchildish

Example

More examples

"Children below the age of 8 have an underdeveloped frontal lobe that might cause them to be unable to separate reality from fantasy. Some of them might believe that there are monsters in their closet or under the bed, for example. They are also sometimes unable to distinguish dreams from reality."

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