denigrator


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den·i·grate

 (dĕn′ĭ-grāt′)
tr.v. den·i·grat·ed, den·i·grat·ing, den·i·grates
1. To attack the character or reputation of; speak ill of; defame: "Speakers before the United States Chamber of Commerce rarely denigrate the businessman as an economic force" (John Kenneth Galbraith).
2. To disparage; belittle: The movie critics denigrated the director's latest film. See Synonyms at disparage.

[Latin dēnigrāre, dēnigrāt-, to blacken, defame : dē-, de- + niger, nigr-, black; see nekw-t- in Indo-European roots.]

den′i·gra′tion n.
den′i·gra′tor n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
"cannibalized" earlier stories, reminding his denigrator that
So although he doesn't tell us this, we may know that Cromwell was deeply contemptuous of Magna Carta, famously once proclaiming that "I care not for Magna Farta." In that sense, both "Noll" and "Charlie" earn their disrespectful nicknames because each was a denigrator of "the root." (23) In the increasingly Manichean world of the late Cantos, history may readily reveal itself as farce, its actors found pathetically wanting when judged in the light of abstract principles whose very naming seems to Pound to constitute their performance.
a denigrator of the great tradition of Negro protest writing and, worst of all for himself as a creative artist, a writer of weak and ineffectual fiction and essays mostly about himself and how he became an artist" (1967, 157).
Unlike Machann, Cohen rather reductively characterizes Romney as a two-dimensional character transformed from "a boorish denigrator to an enthralled acolyte" of Aurora's writing.
Wolfe, letters that could range across decades of his memories--from the most recent outrage perpetrated by some denigrator of Thomas Wolfe to his week-long friendship (featuring several one-on-one basketball games) with tennis great Don Budge in 1934; from a stout defense of his father and anecdotes about the "Gants" (he tended to use the fictional names when he was irked) to the night he sat on a piano bench in a Louisville nightclub shootin' the breeze with Fats Waller.
He was also the most acid denigrator of man's pretence to 'equal himself to God; attribute to himself God's mode of being; pick himself out and set himself apart from the mass of other creatures'.
In his book on the face in cinema, Jacques Aumont sees film as being perhaps the largest denigrator of the face, as an agent of emptying and of petrifaction, but also as a privileged site for its redemption.
For example, in Barry Taylor argues (1980) from the felicity of 'There is someone who loathes that denigrator of his' to the King-like conclusion that the demonstrative element in a complex demonstrative is best treated as a binary quantifier.
It's good to hear that at least one hapless denigrator of the amateur stage has not escaped scot free.
Although Schoonmaker was no hero to me, in his days as a touter of foreign wine and denigrator of the American product, he gives a "recipe" for building a successful premium wine industry in the U.S.