discourage
verb
Simple meaning
Deprive of courage or hope.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dihskurijSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
dɪsˈkɝɪdʒ
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
Deprive of courage or hope; take away hope from; cause to feel discouraged
transitive
To extinguish the courage of; to dishearten; to depress the spirits of; to deprive of confidence; to deject.
transitive
To persuade somebody not to do (something).
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C1 · Advanced
- Frequency
- Uncommon
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Deprive of courage or hope; take away hope from; cause to feel discouraged
Used this way, discourage is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly warm, approving pull. It carries warmth, so it reads as personal rather than detached.
- Emotional tone
- Positive
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Brave and principled
- Usage feel
- Warm and expressive
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use discourage
- “We should discourage this practice among our youth.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
Depriving of confidence or hope or enthusiasm and hence often deterring action.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Antonyms
Sense: deprive of courage or hope
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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.