Meaning & use
ameliorate
Last updated
Meaning
verbtransitiveformal
To make a harmful, difficult, or unpleasant situation less severe without necessarily removing the cause.
Grammar: Takes an object naming the condition: ameliorate poverty; it is not usually followed by to.
Patterns
- ameliorate something
- ameliorate the effects of something
- ameliorate conditions for someone
The fund was created to ameliorate the effects of repeated flooding.
Better lighting and crossing guards helped ameliorate conditions near the school.
Nothing can erase the loss, but counseling may ameliorate the trauma.
Word forms
| third person singular | ameliorates |
|---|---|
| past tense | ameliorated |
| past participle | ameliorated |
| -ing form | ameliorating |
Common combinations
- ameliorate suffering
- Doctors worked to ameliorate suffering during the emergency.
- ameliorate a problem
- The new policy may ameliorate the housing problem, though it will not solve it.
- ameliorate the impact
- Tree planting can ameliorate the impact of urban heat.
- ameliorate conditions
- Unions negotiated changes to ameliorate conditions in the warehouse.
Synonyms and how they differ
- alleviate
- Alleviate is the closest everyday formal word for reducing pain or hardship; ameliorate is rarer and often used with conditions or effects.
- mitigate
- Mitigate often reduces severity, force, or blame; ameliorate is broader for making a bad situation better.
- ease
- Ease is less formal and very common for pain, pressure, or tension; ameliorate fits formal reports about social problems.
Opposites
Word family
- amelioration noun
- The process of making a bad situation better.
- ameliorative adjective
- Serving to improve or reduce harm, used mainly in formal contexts.
Commonly confused: ameliorate or meliorate?
ameliorate vs meliorate
Meliorate is a rare synonym meaning improve; ameliorate is much more common in modern English.
Practice
Choose the best sentence using ameliorate.
Choose one answer.
Ameliorate is transitive and takes the bad condition as its object: ameliorate hunger. It does not take to, and hunger cannot ameliorate a program.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “ameliorate”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.