Meaning & use
calumniate
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Meaning
verbtransitiveformalold-fashioned
To tell lies about a person so that other people think badly of them.
Grammar: Takes a person or group as its object: calumniate a rival.
Patterns
- calumniate someone
- be calumniated by someone
The pamphlet calumniated the mayor by claiming he had stolen from the town.
She felt that the newspaper had calumniated her whole family.
Rivals tried to calumniate the young doctor so that patients would leave his clinic.
Word forms
| third person singular | calumniates |
|---|---|
| past tense | calumniated |
| past participle | calumniated |
| -ing form | calumniating |
Common combinations
- calumniate a rival
- Candidates sometimes calumniate a rival instead of discussing policy.
- unjustly calumniate
- He was unjustly calumniated by people who had never met him.
- publicly calumniate
- The writer publicly calumniated his old teacher in a series of letters.
- be calumniated as
- The reformer was calumniated as a traitor.
- calumniate someone's name
- They set out to calumniate her good name before the election.
Synonyms and how they differ
- slander
- Slander is the everyday and legal term for spoken false statements, while calumniate sounds literary and covers both spoken and written lies.
- defame
- Defame is the usual legal word and stresses the harm done to reputation, whereas calumniate stresses the malicious lying.
- smear
- Smear is informal and suggests a deliberate campaign of dirt, and it can be used even when some of the claims are half true.
- malign
- Malign can mean speaking ill of someone unfairly without necessarily lying outright, so it is a little milder than calumniate.
Opposites
Word family
- calumny noun
- a false and damaging statement about someone
- calumniation noun
- the act of spreading such lies
- calumniator noun
- a person who spreads such lies
- calumnious adjective
- containing or spreading false and damaging claims
Commonly confused: calumniate or culminate?
calumniate vs culminate
Culminate means to reach a final high point, as in a season culminating in a final. It sounds a little like calumniate but has nothing to do with lying.
Practice
A rival editor tried to calumniate the senator. What did the editor do?
Choose one answer.
Calumniate means to spread false and damaging statements. Praising, interviewing or fact-checking someone would not harm a reputation through lies.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “calumniate”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.