depress
verb
Simple meaning
To press down.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dihprehsSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
dɪpˈɹɛs
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
verb
To make depressed, sad or bored.
economics
To cause a depression or a decrease in parts of the economy.
To press down.
To bring down or humble; to abase (pride, etc.).
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C2 · Proficient
- Frequency
- Rare
- Typical Use
- Primarily written
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More ways to use depress
- “The glut of oil depressed gas prices.”verb
- “The lack of rain had depressed the water level in the reservoir.”verb
- “The rising inflation depressed the economy.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
Causing sad feelings of gloom and inadequacy.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Fracture of the skull where the bone is pushed in.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
A sunken or depressed geological formation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.